CECILIA CORTINA SEGOVIA IS A HUMAN TRAFFICKING SPECIALIST AT THE WORKER JUSTICE CENTER IN KINGSTON.
ICE is armed with high-tech tools to track people and deceptive tactics to apprehend them. A July 25 piece in the Intercept shines a bright light on these practices. And you can see exactly how ICE works by using New York’s Immigrant Defense Project web tool, which highlights most of ICE’s busts in the region dating back to 2013, as well as how frequently agents lied about their identity, used fake Facebook ID’s, and pretended to be contractors hiring workers. If all the above is simply carrying out the law, the result is straining the regional economy. According to a 2017 Fiscal Policy Institute Study, there are roughly 105,000 undocumented immigrants over the age of 16 in the region, generating $3.4 billion in spending power and $1.5 billion in taxes, according to New American Economy’s estimate of the 18th and 19th Congressional districts. That economic engine is stalling, however, because the Brookings Institution finds that the foreign-born population in the US in 2017-2018 grew by only 203,000, the slowest rate since 2007, while they also find that the nativeborn birthrate is at an 80-year-low. An economy withers without workers, and another study by Brookings found that the nation is on the cusp of having more seniors than children for the first time in 240 years. According to a 2019 report by the Economic Innovation Group (EIC), we live at ground zero for this crisis, with some of the weakest population growth in the nation across the Hudson Valley. EIC suggests nothing short of the exact opposite of Trump’s policies, vouching to bring in vastly more foreign-born workers to rural areas to reverse this slide, because, for the most part, in addition to a zero or negative birthrate, young people are fleeing rural America at an accelerating pace. The Face of Advocacy Meanwhile there are at least 100,000 immigrants in the Hudson Valley already, and some Americans are choosing to help them. But every one of those advocates’ stories is different. “Coming to the United States wasn’t a dream,” recalls Cecilia Cortina Segovia, a human trafficking specialist at the Worker Justice Center in Kingston, “In fact, it was more like a necessity.” When gang violence erupted in Baja
California, where she was working with her Americanborn husband as an outreach manager to establish an urban farming coalition in the city of La Paz, they decided they had to flee north. “One day we were listening to the gunshots outside the house. We heard them every single night. And I was holding my nine-month-old baby. I had to do what was best for him,” says Segovia. Segovia was born in Mexico. But she isn’t the stereotypical penniless migrant displayed on TV. Fiori of La Voz says too often there’s an immediate air of pity, or spite, against LatinX immigrants, and an expectation that every immigrant is poor and uneducated. “We are individuals. We are not a monolith. Some of us came here with PhDs.” Fiori notes that advocates like Segovia, who has a bachelor’s in educational communication and has a history working for nonprofits, is the face of something more nuanced. “Thanks to Mr. Trump, more white people are woke to what’s going on. But what’s important now is agency—the LatinX community is advocating for itself.” For Segovia, that translated to continuing the kind of battle she waged in Mexico, helping to push for social justice. “When I immigrated in 2014, I was amazed— and not in a good way—even as someone with a decent understanding of English, of how hard this process was. I couldn’t imagine someone who doesn’t speak the language navigating the paperwork.” Segovia began volunteering with Worker Justice in 2015, which has offices in Rochester, Kingston, and Hawthorne and fights against wage theft among blue collar workers in fields such as farming and restaurant jobs. Now, as an expert in human trafficking, she says that it’s mostly not cases of prostitution, but something more like slavery. She cited a current case in which a restaurant worker in the lower Hudson Valley was recruited and smuggled to the US, then forced to work long hours with low pay, and to shell out for his lodging. Eventually when he got hurt on the job, his boss threatened to turn him over to immigration. Segovia says while current New York State law helps somewhat, the problem is at the federal level. She cites a 2014 Urban Institute study, which shows that in 71 percent of the cases of human trafficking the victim entered the US on a legal visa. “They come legally,” Segovia 11/19 CHRONOGRAM FEATURE 77