Immigrant law elicits mixed feedback

PORTLAND – Immigrants in Maine’s largest city are having mixed reactions to a plan to enforce a 50-year-old law requiring noncitizens to report address changes to the federal government within 10 days or face the consequence of possible deportation.

The Justice Department said the plan will help enhance border security and address the issue of noncitizens avoiding deportation by not informing officials of their location.

Critics question whether the law can be effectively enforced with an estimated 11 million noncitizens who are 15 and older living in the United States.

John Connors, the Maine director of LULAC, a Latino civil rights group, wondered how the Immigration and Naturalization Service would be able to manage more responsibility.

“The people they are going to be chasing around are not terrorists,” Connors said.

But the Rev. Michael Gatkek, a refugee from Sudan, said he believed the policy is fair. Although learning all the laws is a challenge for newcomers, he said adhering to the policy makes sense.

“The [INS] is the agent that brought people to the United States,” he said.

INS officials emphasized this week that the plan calls for enforcing a law that has long been on the books.

It comes as the INS and U.S. colleges scramble to finish a computerized system to monitor the whereabouts of foreign students by next year. In addition, the INS is completing a plan to document all foreigners crossing U.S. borders.

E’nkul Kanakan, who is from Congo, believes the new policy targets those with no connection to terrorists. He said such treatment goes against the ideals upon which America was founded.

“The sense of equal rights and fair treatment is a notion that makes this country what it is,” said Kanakan, who is a U.S. citizen. “It becomes very contradictory that the ideals of the fathers of this nation are interpreted according to the situation.”