Essay 4843

From The Washington Post…

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Hispanics Feeling Heat Of Immigration Debate
Survey Finds Majority Feel Vulnerable

By N.C. Aizenman, Washington Post Staff Writer

Regardless of their immigration status, Hispanics across the United States are feeling anxious and discriminated against amid the intensifying debate over immigration and stepped-up enforcement by authorities, according to a study of the nation’s largest minority group released yesterday.

More than half of the 2,003 Hispanic adults surveyed by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center said they worry that they or a close friend or family member might be deported, and nearly two-thirds believed that Congress’s failure to pass a bill restructuring immigration law this year has made life more difficult for all Latinos.

“What we have here is a portrait of a population that is feeling vulnerable in the current political and policy climate,” said Paul Taylor, acting director of the Pew Hispanic Center. “And what’s interesting is that it’s not just true of the foreign born but of the native born, including many people who have been here for generations.”

Though the federal government has substantially increased enforcement actions such as workplace raids over the past five years, the numbers arrested through such actions remain infinitesimal compared to the almost 8 million undocumented immigrants in the workforce.

Nonetheless, noted Taylor, “as part of tried and true enforcement policy, a number of raids in the last year or so have been very high profile. … So in some ways, the actual numbers [arrested] may underestimate the changed reality as it is perceived by people in the Latino community.”

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