Mixed Results

By: Fernando DiazWith a pen stroke in November 2005, Gov. Rod Blagojevich opened a new chapter in Illinois’ long history as a home for immigrants. At a convention hosted by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights at Navy Pier that year, flanked by thousands of immigrants, community organizers and lawmakers, Blagojevich, the son of a Serbian immigrant, signed Executive Order 2005-10.

“Like so many people across Illinois, I am a first generation American. I will always be proud that my parents worked hard and sacrificed to give us a chance at the American Dream,” Blagojevich said. “Today, with the New Americans Executive Order, we can make the State of Illinois an active partner with immigrant families to help them achieve the American Dream.”

The order was the culmination of several policies that had extended rights, such as health insurance for all children and in-state tuition for the undocumented, to the state’s growing immigrant population since Blagojevich was elected in 2002. The order was a landmark for Illinois, which became the first in the nation to develop a comprehensive strategy to assist immigrants’ fold into the fabric of American life against a backdrop of stalled reforms at the federal level.

The order established the Office of New Americans Policy and Advocacy to coordinate and improve access to service and programs for the historic number of immigrants who are settling in Illinois and changing the state’s demographics beyond the entry points of Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods. It also established national and local policy councils and charged an initial group of nine state agencies, called the Interagency Task Force, with developing and implementing recommendations to better serve immigrants.

In December 2006, the task force issued its report, which highlighted some best practices, and presented recommendations for the agencies to implement.

Nearly a year later, The Chicago Reporter tried to assess the progress by contacting each of the nine agencies, but the request was denied. Instead, officials from the Office of New Americans Policy and Advocacy and other proponents of the initiative responded to questions about the program by providing general comments about its implementation.

According to officials, progress toward fulfilling the governor’s order has been steady, though they could not specify exactly how many of the recommendations each of the nine agencies has adopted or to what extent certain imperatives might already have been in place.

“The difficulty in answering the questions is that it’s different for every state agency as to how far they are,” said Grace Hou, assistant secretary at the Illinois Department of Human Services, where she has led the work on the initiative.

According to the governor’s order, the agencies were to have developed by Sept. 1, 2007, “New Americans plans” that spell out how to meet the needs of the immigrant population by instituting measures such as language and cultural competency tests and bilingual pay policies that standardize compensation for on-the-job language skills, as well as developing protocols for the use of interpreters and plans for communicating with limited English proficient individuals. But officials acknowledged this has yet to happen.

They also said the agencies have yet to implement another recommendation: to standardize the way to collect data that could show who was getting or needing services in languages other than English.

Observers say the stakes are so high that it is critical for the officials to overcome the challenges facing the initiative quickly.

“Illinois’ economy is changing. Illinois’ demographics are changing. Immigrants are here filling key parts of our labor market needs,” said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which has been partnering with the state in citizenship programs and helped develop the governor’s order. “And, if we are strategic about this, everybody benefits. If we’re stupid about this, everybody suffers.”

Jonathan Blazer, public benefits policy attorney for the National Immigration Law Center, a Los Angelesbased immigrant advocacy group, said he believes the state is taking the issue of immigrant integration seriously but said officials need to make sure their efforts will lead to substantive change. “Immigrants don’t need symbolic victories,” he said. “People need to … continue to hold government accountable to realize the promise of what they’re setting up.”

Sylvia Puente, director of the Metropolitan Chicago Initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies and a member of the state’s New Americans Immigrant Policy Council, said she’s worried that politics is also getting in the way. In the summer, squabbles in the Springfield over the state budget led to reduction in funds required for the initiative. “The governor has done a proactive job by even putting this on the radar,” she said. “But I’m concerned about the state’s [budget] meltdown, period.”

Despite the hurdles, officials said they have managed to accomplish several of their goals.

Last summer, for example, the Office of New Americans Policy and Advocacy and the Department of Human Services opened the first Illinois Welcoming Center in northwest suburban Melrose Park to centralize state services for immigrants.

José Luis Gutierrez, director of the Office of New American Policy and Advocacy, touted the center as a result of the cooperation among member agencies. According to Gerardo Cardenas, spokesman for the governor’s office, eight separate state agencies contributed about $1.1 million for its operating expenses.

Hou’s influence has also helped the Department of Human Services take the lead on some initiatives that others have yet to take on, like translating vital documents into Spanish. Her department has also managed to collect data that captures service delivery, enrollment in WIC and Early Intervention programs that were provided in languages other than English.

Officials said they believe they’re poised for more progress this year after reworking their strategy. Last year, instead of having each agency develop its own policy, officials decided to establish global standards that would be put to use by all state agencies.

They are working to contract with an outside organization or collective of immigrant advocacy groups to develop these standards and help implement them in each agency.

Officials are confident that the contract will be awarded sometime this fiscal year, which ends in June, and Hou said at least $200,000 has so far been set aside to fund the contract.

The officials are hoping that this system will lay a solid foundation for the future. “We want there to be a legacy,” Hou said.

Still, with hundreds of millions of dollars cut from next year’s state budget, some say the financial fate of the proposed solution is still unclear.

Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, said human services like immigrant programs tend to get underfunded because they are not high-priority items for lawmakers. “What the state has done over the last decade is [to] cut funding to human service providers because human services are not as universally politically attractive,” he said.

“Illinois is swimming against the tide,” said Michael Fix, vice president and director of studies at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.- based think tank, and a member of Illinois’ National Advisory Council that was established to provide context for reforms and promote the initiative’s strengths nationwide.

The state, Fix points out, is embarking on fine-tuning its service delivery mechanisms for immigrants and refugees at a time when raids by federal authorities have peaked and local governments are enacting their own measures in response to the growth of immigrant population. Measures include making English the official language and making it more difficult to obtain drivers’ licenses.

In 2007, at least 1,400 pieces of legislation related to immigration were introduced in state legislatures nationwide, more than double the number of bills introduced the year before, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Among the measures, Arizona passed a law requiring all employers use the Basic Pilot Program, which provides access to federal databases to determine employee eligibility, while Tennessee, which also requires use of the program, criminalized hiring undocumented workers and prohibited use of federal taxpayer identification numbers for hiring purposes. Oklahoma also passed a law requiring use of the program.

In marked contrast, the Department of Homeland Security sued Illinois in September for refusing to allow employers to participate in the same program.

And there is a sign that the state’s effort is being seen as a model elsewhere in the country. In August, New Jersey followed Illinois by proposing a similar comprehensive integration strategy, and others are said to be considering similar initiatives.

Nathan Newman, policy director for the Progressive States Network, a New Yorkbased organization that works to promote and support progressive legislation, said he expects initiatives like Illinois’ will spread as the immigrant population continues to gain political clout. “It’s smart politics in the narrow view but also smarter in the broad sense because new coalitions are building,” he said. “Those who support these policies are going to remain and become the future of Illinois politics.”

Hoyt of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights agreed. “I don’t believe the state is going to move backward on these issues of immigrant integration because they are common sense,” he said.

But having taken the lead nationally in immigrant integration has meant that there were hard lessons to be learned.

The Office of New Americans set out a bold agenda but has found out that it is not immune to dwindling budgets and major conflicts in Springfield. Over the summer, tensions between Gov. Blagojevich, Speaker of the House Michael Madigan and Senate President Emil Jones led to intense budget negotiations that ultimately rejected a $1.7 million request from the Department of Human Services to fund the Illinois Welcoming Center and various immigrant integration projects, Hou said.

Blagojevich also vetoed at least $460 million in August that included funding for mental health, school programs and other human services. Funding for some of the organizations that have proven a critical asset in the state’s mechanism for reaching immigrants were also among what Blagojevich has called the “pork and nonessential spending” that were cut from the budget.

The cuts included funds for an immigrant integration program for high school students and their parents in Skokie, an immigrant welcoming center to formalize services provided by a church in Schaumburg, as well as grants for English language programs.

Graciela Contreras, a Hispanic ministry coordinator for the Archdiocese of Chicago and a board member of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said she’s disappointed with these cuts. She said she thinks that Blagojevich’s intentions are good, but he needs to “put your money where your mouth is.”

But Cardenas, Blagojevich’s spokesman, said the vetoes don’t demonstrate a lack of commitment to immigrants by the governor. “Saying that his commitment to immigrants, which has been constant over the five years he’s been in office, is put into question because some pork projects got vetoed is in my view a very limited, very biased view of the issue,” he said. “Some projects in the budget are worthwhile, and we are interested in seeing some funded—but not at the expense of health care for families or mammograms for uninsured women.”

Aside from the financial issues, navigating the bureaucracy that is state government has also posed its own challenges for officials at the Office of New Americans Policy and Advocacy. Hou said that, until Blagojevich signed the executive order, dealing with limited English proficient individuals was not even on the agenda. Several agencies had their own policies, but there were no standard ways to ensure that interpreters were qualified to provide translation.

In some ways, Hou and her colleagues who are working on the initiative are learning to play ball within a system they’ve mostly known from the outside. Before Blagojevich appointed Hou as assistant secretary at the Department of Human Services, she had spent most of her career working at or leading community organizations.

From 1998 to 2003, she served as the executive director of the Chinese Mutual Aid Association in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. Providing services to immigrants was a common theme in most of her work there. In 1999, for example, she testified before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of immigrant workers who were eligible for certain protections available to U.S. citizens. In 2000, Hou served on several boards, one of which monitored the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. And, a year later, Hou protested state funding cuts for immigrant programs that would have severely impacted their ability to provide services.

“It’s a different universe,” Hou said of working for the state. “We serve millions of people a year, and just getting a toehold on the types of services we offer was difficult.”

In her new role, she said she has found success by focusing on developing a sense of ownership among the initiative’s different partners, “I try to foster a spirit of cooperation and respect, and it’s been really effective,” she said.

Gutierrez followed a similar path to his post as first director of the Office of New Americans Policy and Advocacy.

An immigrant from Mexico, Gutierrez spent years playing an instrumental role in mobilizing Mexican neighborhood organizations in Illinois to increase their political influence and raise money for projects in Mexico. In 2002, Gutierrez was elected to serve on a council to advise the Mexican president on migrant issues. In 2006, he was also among the Latino leaders who planned a massive protest in Chicago.

Gutierrez said he and his colleagues have the perseverance to overcome the latest challenges. Speaking at Loyola University during an immigrant integration conference this fall, Gutierrez said that the influence of the officials leading the initiative has been instrumental in steering it thus far and will likely ensure it continues forward.

“Our experiences working within the community have provided us with a clear vision of what is necessary,” Gutierrez said.

“From the community perspective, we have been fighting for this for 20 years,” said Gutierrez, who immigrated to this country in 1986.

“We are really getting things done,” he said.