Local voices promote benefits of immigration to region
On a day when the Trump administration unveiled new policies to intensify the hunt for and deportation of immigrants without legal status, numerous Pittsburgh-area voices mobilized to send a different narrative.
Civic, religious and immigrant-community leaders released statistics asserting that immigrants have brought more than $2 billion in annual spending power to the region’s economy and include thousands of entrepreneurs and homeowners.
But beyond the numbers, they lamented the direction of U.S. policies and rhetoric that emphasize deportations, wall-building and a sharp reduction in refugees.
“We’re losing so much of who we are in these executive orders,” said Gisele Fetterman at a news
conference she and her husband, Braddock Mayor John Fetterman, hosted in their home. “It’s very painful,” said Ms. Fetterman, an immigrant from Brazil. Historically, “America is a country of compassion.”
The news conference, already scheduled before the Trump administration announcements, released figures of a survey overseen by the New American Economy, a consortium that promotes immigration reform. The report said there are more than 80,000 foreignborn residents of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, and that as of 2014, some 4,409 entrepreneurs and 19,066 homeowners. Coordinating the event was Change Agency, an enterprise that promotes countywide policies to better integrate immigrants.
During the news conference, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto pointed across the street from the Fetterman home to the Mon Valley Works, one of the region’s few still-functioning steel operations, and spoke of his immigrant ancestors who came to work in such mills. Today, he said, immigrants are fueling the economy at such institutions as UPMC and Carnegie Mellon University.
He noted that in the 1920s, the U.S. restricted immigration from certain countries. “We have an opportunity to learn from those mistakes,” he said.
Also Tuesday, numerous area civic and religious leaders released a statement voicing “our concern over the current tenor around immigration and global engagement. We assert that policies that impede these areas are detrimental to the interests of the Pittsburgh area and limit our ability to grow a competitive, thriving, and resilient region at every level.” Signers included numerous bishops and other Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy as well as political leaders.
In a separate interview Tuesday, Sheila Vélez Martínez, professor of asylum, refugee and immigration law at the University of Pittsburgh, said the Trump administration’s new procedures “are very far from being a humane immigration policy.”
She said there has long been a bipartisan recognition for the need for “comprehensive immigration reform that is done through congressional action.” This, she said, would have included consideration for the needs of U.S.born children of immigrant parents who lack legal status, and a path to legal status “for people who have been in the United States for 15 or 20 years, have made their lives here, have worked hard and paid taxes and never had any issues with the law.”
The new policies, she said, are a “missed opportunity,” said Ms. Martinez, who is also director of clinical programs and the Immigration Law Clinic at Pitt.
By abandoning the Obama-era emphasis on deporting felons and other serious criminals, and putting anyone convicted or even only charged with any crime in danger of deportation, “the lack of priorities would create a further backlog in immigration courts.”
And, she said, it "doesn’t do anything to facilitate legal migration.”
If the goal is to get potential immigrants “to follow the rules and the legal pathway, then you have to create a process that works,” she said.