ALBANY — Gov. Paterson — in the latest rebuke to Arizona’s hard-line immigration law — announced yesterday a new “get out of jail” pardon panel to review convictions that threaten to boot legal immigrants from the state.
The Democratic governor said his special Immigrant Pardoning Board would seek to quash any “minor crime or old conviction” that could lead to the deportation or indefinite detention of an otherwise upstanding foreign national who has run afoul of federal immigration authorities.
“If we think these individuals deserve and have earned an opportunity to stay in this country and try to become citizens, we will grant those pardons,” Paterson said.
Paterson said there “may be thousands” who came into the country legally but face deportation or other penalties because of retroactive changes to federal immigration laws in the mid-1990s.
In March, Paterson pardoned Quing Wu, a 29-year-old Chinese immigrant who faced deportation because of a robbery conviction 15 years earlier.
Sen. Martin Golden (R-Brooklyn) said he needed to see the details of Paterson’s plan but questioned whether it was fair to pardon immigrants while citizens can’t get jobs because of their criminal records.
“If this is a get-out-of-jail card, then that’s wrong,” Golden said.
“If you’re going to point to an egregious case so you can get 10,000-15,000 people to become legal all of a sudden, then that’s wrong.”
The panel, which would be made up of members of the governor’s staff, would limit its review to pardon applications it receives from legal immigrants, a Paterson spokesman said. The governor would then issue pardons to those he found deserving.
Paterson announced the move just nine days after his Republican counterpart in Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer, signed the nation’s toughest immigration law, which empowers local law enforcement to seek out and arrest illegal immigrants. Paterson has denounced the Arizona measure.
He insisted, however, the pardon-panel plan had been under discussion “for a while.”