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Posted 04.13.06 Legislation, Lack of Unity Said to Weaken Caribbean Communities Nationwide (Hardbeatnews.com) By Gergana Koleva Hardbeatnews, NEW YORK, N.Y., Tue. Mar. 21, 2006: An inauspicious combination of lack of immigrant voting rights and a failure to form a united front is keeping Caribbean communities across the United States from influencing policies that affect them socially and economically, two recent presentations suggest. In New York last week, a City Hall press conference drew a crowd of community activists, academics, and reporters for a discussion on the Non-Citizen Voting Rights Restoration Act. The bill, which was introduced in the New York City Council last April, aims to roll back resident voting for documented immigrants who have yet to obtain U.S. citizenship -- a practice discontinued in the 1920s due to the large influx of immigrants. At the gathering, speakers showed how barring residents from exercising the fundamental voting right directly impacts about 1,600,000 adult New Yorkers, at least 168,000 of whom immigrants from the Caribbean. "Elected city officials can and frequently do ignore these communities because they know they don't have the formal power to elect representatives," said Ron Hayduk, a professor of political science at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY) and author of the book Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the U.S. He argued that all immigrants who are legally present in the U.S. should have a say in how their money is spent because like all other citizens they too pay taxes. "Taxation without representation is un-American and undemocratic. Non-citizen voting is the suffrage movement of our day," Hayduk added, recalling America's Revolutionary War cry. For Caribbean immigrants, the absence of representatives in city politics translates into poor access to health services and public transportation, public safety and policing, and mistaken identity cases, said Michele Wucker, co-director of the Immigrant Voting Project at the World Policy Institute. Wucker recounted the 1992 public protests in Washington Heights over ethnic profiling of Dominicans as drug dealers, the 1997 torture of Abner Louima, and the 2000 shooting death of Patrick Dorismond, both immigrants from Haiti, by members of the New York Police Department. "There are a lot of stereotypes about certain ethnic groups, and without representation those communities have no recourse to let government know that they need to address the problems," she said. Lack of political representation also affects Caribbean businesses. Underscoring its effect, Wucker cited a recent case in which the city council tried to prevent local businesses from displaying signs in any foreign language. That resolution was supported by a non-immigrant community representative for Jackson Heights, a Queens neighborhood with a dense Caribbean population. Wucker noted that currently 56 percent of adult Dominicans in NYC are disenfranchised because of their citizenship status, making them the largest non-voting community among Caribbean immigrants. But according to some, the blockage of non-citizen immigrants from the voting booth is only part of a much larger problem. Chuck Mohan, president of Guyanese-American Workers United, said inadequate civic services within Caribbean communities are essentially the result of a collective mentality that refuses to think small. "The way Caribbean communities typically think is that everyone wants to be leader and no one wants to do real community work, to be an organizer, to work at the grassroots level. Some of them think it's demeaning to stand on the corner and hand out flyers, but this is part of the political process," said Mohan. He added that once they come to America, many people from the Caribbean acquire an urge to accumulate material possessions and become complacent about larger issues. "The questions they begin asking themselves are, "What can I get? How many homes and cars can I buy? How much can I accumulate -- because this is America?' And for some of them nothing else matters until there's a problem. Once they buy that house and need a zoning change, that's when they want and try to reach out. They don't see the steps involved in the political process." Mohan said with the exception of the Jamaican community, which has the most representatives in the political arena, this pattern of thinking is a problem across the Caribbean diaspora in the U.S. Along with cultural and individual characteristics, he also blames community churches for failing to encourage civic consciousness. Patrick Gaspard, vice president of politics and legislation of New York's Health and Human Services Union, said as much in a speech he delivered at the 9th Annual National Haitian Student Conference held at New York University earlier this month. "People of my father's generation always talk about 'Haiti Cherie,'" deadpanned Gaspard, a first-generation Haitian-American. "They always talk about what needs to happen in Haiti, who should be in power, and who should be out. But they never discuss what we can do here, in our own backyard." Gaspard stressed that New York City is the only U.S. city with a major Haitian population where that group lacks a representative in the city council. "We failed to coalesce around a particular message which means we must be absolutely deaf, because we don't have the ability to hear one another." The first Haitian-American to serve as deputy borough president of the Borough of Manhattan is Rosemande Pierre-Louis. She is a founding member of the African-American Task Force on Violence Against Women. -- Hardbeatnews.com |
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