IMMIGRATION MATTERS: Getting No Bill at All Is Better Than Senate Bill
New America Media, Commentary/Analysis, David Bacon, May 25, 2006
Editor's Note: Many grassroots immigrant rights groups outside Washington, D.C., say that failure to pass any immigration reform is better than any possible combination of the current House and Senate immigration bills. David Bacon is an associate editor at New America Media and author of "The Children of NAFTA" (University of California Press, 2004). He sits on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Committee of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition.
SAN FRANCISCO--When the U.S. Senate passed its version of "comprehensive immigration reform" on Thursday, senators from both sides of the aisle claimed that despite the enormous controversy the bill has generated, passing a bill with flaws was better than passing no bill at all. Outside of the beltway and its coterie of lobbyists, however, a groundswell of community groups now argue that Congress would do better to pass no bill than to enact a bill which reconciles the proposal just passed by the Senate, and that passed last December in the House of Representatives.
In a statement condemning the latest Hagel-Martinez compromise, S 2611, the proposal that just passed on Thursday, immigrant rights advocates convened by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights argued Wednesday that "the rush to reach a bipartisan accord on immigration legislation has led to a compromise that would create deep divisions within the immigrant community and leave millions of undocumented immigrants in the shadows."
"The current Senate bill," said Sheila Chung, of the San Francisco Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, "does not reflect the immigration reform called for by millions of immigrant communities marching the streets."
The United States is currently home to over 12 million people without immigration documents, which makes them and their families subject to deportation and vulnerable to exploitation at work. Nevertheless, the groups point to the following provisions of the Senate bill, which will make immigrants much worse off than they are even at present:
--Under the Senate's legalization plan, those with less than two years in the United States (about a million people) would be immediately subject to deportation. Those with two to five years must leave the country, and may apply to re-enter through some currently unknown process. The ability of border stations to handle the applications of the 3 to 4 million people involved is doubtful, given the current years-long backlog in normal visa applications.
--Like HR 4437 passed by the House in December, the Senate bill would ramp up the enforcement of current employer sanctions to make it a crime for undocumented people to hold a job. Employers often use this law to retaliate against workers who try to enforce labor standards or join unions. The Social Security Administration would become immigration police, forcing all workers to carry a new national ID card, and would require employers to fire anyone who's documents they question. The current Basic Pilot program, which moves in this direction, has shown the SSA database to be rife with errors.
--The Senate bill establishes and expands guest worker programs, allowing employers to recruit workers outside the country on temporary visas. These new contract workers would be vulnerable to employer pressure, since their visa status would be dependant on their employment. Further, as the AFL-CIO's Ana Avendaño points out, "this turns jobs that are now held by permanent employees with rights and benefits into jobs filled by temporary, contract employees. It basically takes the jobs of millions of people out of the protections of the New Deal won by workers decades ago." The labor federation points out that if currently undocumented workers and new immigrants were given permanent residence status instead of temporary visas, they would be able to exercise their rights as workers and community residents.
--The Senate bill "vastly increases detention and deportation practices and further militarizes the border," according to the New York-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. The Halliburton Corporation has already been given a U.S. contract for construction of immigrant detention facilities near the border with Mexico, and proposals have been made for reopening closed military bases to house deportees and detainees. The bill makes document fraud an aggravated felony and grounds for deportation, resulting in the criminalization of the millions of immigrants who have had to provide false Social Security cards to employers in order to get hired.
Stan Mark, AALDEF director, warned before passage of S 2611 that "the upsurge in the mass movement will redefine this debate well into the elections if Congress passes their so-called 'compromise' of comprehensive immigration reform." He calls instead for eliminating current laws penalizing lack of legal status, especially employer sanctions. "The political climate of the debate," AALDEF says, "has converted this immigration bill into a Trojan horse into which lawmakers have crammed anti-immigrant and undemocratic policies."
The NNIRR declaration, a set of principles enumerated by AALDEF, and similar programs put forward by groups outside of Washington all emphasize the need for positive, pro-immigrant alternatives. They include immediate legal status for the undocumented, easier family reunification and elimination of the backlog in processing visa applications, no guest worker programs, ending the indefinite detention of immigrants, restoring due process to immigration proceedings and an end to the militarization of the U.S. border with Mexico.
Since the Senate has approved a bill far removed from these principles, and the House has enacted an enforcement-only bill that is even more hostile to immigrants, immigrant rights advocates believe killing all current proposals is their only option.
That might, in fact, be the outcome of efforts to reconcile the House and Senate bills, since the most conservative House Republicans oppose any legal status for the undocumented. "It is possible that a reconciliation between HR 4437 and S 2611 will not happen in the conference committee," speculates Evelyn Sanchez of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. "Should this happen, we will have time to continue pushing for real and fair comprehensive immigration reform. If HR 4437 and S 2611 are successfully reconciled, and the president signs the bill into law, then we have the task of overturning that law."
Despite the grim scenario, advocates are unwilling to give up. "It's been done before," she says.
Photo above by David Bacon. Photo on home page by Kevin Chan.
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Friday, May 26, 2006
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Immigration debate may get ugly: history
If History Is a Guide, The Immigration Debate Is Going to Get Ugly Very Fast
By Mark W. Naison
Dr. Naison is Professor of History and African American Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of Communists in Harlem During the Great Depression, White Boy: A Memoir, co-editor of The Tenant Movement in New York City, and over 100 articles on African American politics, social movements and American culture and sports. Dr. Naison is the Principal Investigator of the Bronx African American History Project.
As someone who has spent his adult life studying American labor history, I watch the unfolding of the current immigration debate with growing trepidation. As conservative demands for sealing of borders clash with the newly awakened immigrant community's demands for amnesty and liberalized migration rules, I can't help but think of a time after World War I when a nation panicked by the growing visibility and assertiveness of Southern and Eastern European immigrants passed the tightest immigration laws in the nation's history.
The parallels with the current situation are almost eerie. Between 1890 and 1919, Southern and Eastern European immigrants, almost none of the them English speaking, flooded into the nation's cities and factory towns by the millions, becoming the nation's major labor force in steel, mining, food processing, and garment production. It was their skill and labor that sparked the United States emergence as the world's major industrial power, yet to most Americans, they remained virtually invisible. Confined to ghettoes and "hunkietowns" where they could speak their own language, spawning a host of immigrant enterprieses, often returning to their own countries when they accumulated a nest egg, these laboring men and women,even when they became the majority in urban areas, had virtually no daily contact with English speaking Americans By the time World War I broke out, large expanses of metropolises like New York Chicago, and Pittsburgh, or cities like Patterson and Akron, were places where no English was spoken, and resembled European peasant villages more than New England country towns
World War I ended the immigrants invisibility, and with it, the atmosphere of tolerance for their presence. First came a three year debate over American entry into the war, which revealed a powerful immigrant presence in the ranks of anti-war activists, especially those motivated by Socialist ideals; then came the drive a constitutional amendment banning the sale and alchohol beverages, which found its strongest opposition in immigrant neighborhoods, and finally came the nationwide strike wave of 1919 which showed the power of immigrant workers to shut down entire industries and in a few cases, entire cities.
By the time of the 1920 Presidential Election, large portions of the electorate had become convinced that Southern and Eastern European immigration had to be stopped in its tracks. This reaction was fueled by a fear of crime as much as fear of labor unrest and political radicalism. The widespread defiance of national prohibition in immigrant working class neighborhoods and the rise of powerful crime syndicates, seemed to particularly enrage nativists and helped spark a revival of the Ku Klux Klan as a nationwide movement Like the Minutemen of today, the Klan of the 20’s took the law into to their own hands, attacking bootleggers, blacks, Catholics and Jews, with tactics that ranged from cross burnings to lynchings.
By 1924, immigration restriction had become the dominant issue of the national Republican Party and the result was a passage of immigration codes, based entirely on country of origin, that changed the face of America for two generations. Immigration from the nations of Eastern Europe, which exceeded 400,000 in 1919, was cut to under 40,000. Immigration from Italy was restricted to 4,000. The working class immigrant ghettoes of scores of American cities were deprived of new arrivals that would keep ethnic business districts alive and assure the preservation of European languges. Over time, with the aid of a public school system that used English only and a powerful and seductive popular culture that reached people through radio and movies, residents would become Anglicized and Americanized and the multilingual urban neighborhoods of the 20’s would become a distant memory.
Could this happen again? Definitely. The movement to close off our borders and expel undocumented immigrants is becoming more strident and more powerful daily, and unlike the immigrant protesters and their allies, its partisans have the votes to make themselves a potent force in national politics. Another terror attack on American soil, or a serious downturn in the American economy, will give those forces added energy, and is also likely to add tens of thousands of new followers to the Minutemen and violent white supremacist groups determined to make immigrants targets of violence and intimidation. It is also not impossible that black-immigrant conflicts could be exacerbated in these circumstances, turning a potential alliance into ugly competition over a shrinking supply of jobs.
To be honest, nothing I see leads me to be optimistic of how the immigrant issue will unfold over the next ten years. Panic about immigration is spreading into every region and demographic groups, affecting small towns and cities as well as great metropolitan areas. And since there is no easy way to curtail immigration without a vast, and expensive, expansion of the national security apparatus we can expect to see immense pressure on the government to federal and state governments to accelerate raids and deportations, deny routine privileges to undocumented immigrants, seal off and militarize the Mexican border.
I hope I am wrong about this. But every sign I see shows the anti-immigrant movement growing as powerful, violent and effective as it was 75 years ago. Advocates for immigrant communities are going to have to fight long and hard to defend the right of undocumented people to live free of harassment and intimidation, and to secure for them the protections of the law and a realistic path to citizenship.
By Mark W. Naison
Dr. Naison is Professor of History and African American Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of Communists in Harlem During the Great Depression, White Boy: A Memoir, co-editor of The Tenant Movement in New York City, and over 100 articles on African American politics, social movements and American culture and sports. Dr. Naison is the Principal Investigator of the Bronx African American History Project.
As someone who has spent his adult life studying American labor history, I watch the unfolding of the current immigration debate with growing trepidation. As conservative demands for sealing of borders clash with the newly awakened immigrant community's demands for amnesty and liberalized migration rules, I can't help but think of a time after World War I when a nation panicked by the growing visibility and assertiveness of Southern and Eastern European immigrants passed the tightest immigration laws in the nation's history.
The parallels with the current situation are almost eerie. Between 1890 and 1919, Southern and Eastern European immigrants, almost none of the them English speaking, flooded into the nation's cities and factory towns by the millions, becoming the nation's major labor force in steel, mining, food processing, and garment production. It was their skill and labor that sparked the United States emergence as the world's major industrial power, yet to most Americans, they remained virtually invisible. Confined to ghettoes and "hunkietowns" where they could speak their own language, spawning a host of immigrant enterprieses, often returning to their own countries when they accumulated a nest egg, these laboring men and women,even when they became the majority in urban areas, had virtually no daily contact with English speaking Americans By the time World War I broke out, large expanses of metropolises like New York Chicago, and Pittsburgh, or cities like Patterson and Akron, were places where no English was spoken, and resembled European peasant villages more than New England country towns
World War I ended the immigrants invisibility, and with it, the atmosphere of tolerance for their presence. First came a three year debate over American entry into the war, which revealed a powerful immigrant presence in the ranks of anti-war activists, especially those motivated by Socialist ideals; then came the drive a constitutional amendment banning the sale and alchohol beverages, which found its strongest opposition in immigrant neighborhoods, and finally came the nationwide strike wave of 1919 which showed the power of immigrant workers to shut down entire industries and in a few cases, entire cities.
By the time of the 1920 Presidential Election, large portions of the electorate had become convinced that Southern and Eastern European immigration had to be stopped in its tracks. This reaction was fueled by a fear of crime as much as fear of labor unrest and political radicalism. The widespread defiance of national prohibition in immigrant working class neighborhoods and the rise of powerful crime syndicates, seemed to particularly enrage nativists and helped spark a revival of the Ku Klux Klan as a nationwide movement Like the Minutemen of today, the Klan of the 20’s took the law into to their own hands, attacking bootleggers, blacks, Catholics and Jews, with tactics that ranged from cross burnings to lynchings.
By 1924, immigration restriction had become the dominant issue of the national Republican Party and the result was a passage of immigration codes, based entirely on country of origin, that changed the face of America for two generations. Immigration from the nations of Eastern Europe, which exceeded 400,000 in 1919, was cut to under 40,000. Immigration from Italy was restricted to 4,000. The working class immigrant ghettoes of scores of American cities were deprived of new arrivals that would keep ethnic business districts alive and assure the preservation of European languges. Over time, with the aid of a public school system that used English only and a powerful and seductive popular culture that reached people through radio and movies, residents would become Anglicized and Americanized and the multilingual urban neighborhoods of the 20’s would become a distant memory.
Could this happen again? Definitely. The movement to close off our borders and expel undocumented immigrants is becoming more strident and more powerful daily, and unlike the immigrant protesters and their allies, its partisans have the votes to make themselves a potent force in national politics. Another terror attack on American soil, or a serious downturn in the American economy, will give those forces added energy, and is also likely to add tens of thousands of new followers to the Minutemen and violent white supremacist groups determined to make immigrants targets of violence and intimidation. It is also not impossible that black-immigrant conflicts could be exacerbated in these circumstances, turning a potential alliance into ugly competition over a shrinking supply of jobs.
To be honest, nothing I see leads me to be optimistic of how the immigrant issue will unfold over the next ten years. Panic about immigration is spreading into every region and demographic groups, affecting small towns and cities as well as great metropolitan areas. And since there is no easy way to curtail immigration without a vast, and expensive, expansion of the national security apparatus we can expect to see immense pressure on the government to federal and state governments to accelerate raids and deportations, deny routine privileges to undocumented immigrants, seal off and militarize the Mexican border.
I hope I am wrong about this. But every sign I see shows the anti-immigrant movement growing as powerful, violent and effective as it was 75 years ago. Advocates for immigrant communities are going to have to fight long and hard to defend the right of undocumented people to live free of harassment and intimidation, and to secure for them the protections of the law and a realistic path to citizenship.
Friday, May 19, 2006
Mexico's economic woes and NAFTA
South of the border
The impact of Mexico's economic woes
- Jeff Faux
Thursday, May 18, 2006
In his speech Monday night, President Bush once again ignored the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the center of the immigration debate -- Mexico, the source of more than three-quarters of illegal immigrants in America.
Like the rest of Washington, Bush talks as if the problem of illegal immigration can be solved within the borders of this country. More border guards might make crossing the frontier more difficult, and amnesty and guest-worker programs might redefine the meaning of "legal," but they will not stop -- and may well accelerate -- the growing tide of people driven north by poverty and the lack of job opportunities at home.
Some 40 percent of the more than 100 million people still living in Mexico say they would come to the United States if they had the opportunity, which can be bought for the roughly $2,500 or so it costs for a "coyote" to smuggle them across the border. Last year, at least 400 died in the attempt.
This was not supposed to happen. Thirteen years ago, when illegal immigration from Mexico across a less-protected border was half of what it is today, we were assured that the North American Free Trade Agreement would transform Mexico into a prosperous middle-class society. "There will be less illegal immigration," promised President Bill Clinton, "because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home." Mexican President Carlos Salinas told Americans it was a choice between getting Mexican tomatoes or tomato pickers.
But NAFTA did not deliver. Mexico has grown too slowly to create enough jobs for its people, and the benefits of trade have largely gone to the wealthy, making it one of the most unequal societies in Latin America. Moreover, the agreement flooded Mexico with highly subsidized U.S. and Canadian grain, driving between 1 million and 2 million Mexican farmers off the land and adding to the supply of desperate Mexicans looking for work.
NAFTA stands in vivid contrast to the experience of the economic integration of Western Europe, which actually provided for free migration among the participating nations. Originally there was great fear that Germany, France and the other rich economies would be flooded with workers from Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece. To avoid this, the European community provided funds for economic development programs, which stimulated job growth in the poorer nations and insisted on domestic reforms that assured that the economic growth would be broadly shared. The result was that the people of the poorer nations stayed home and prospered.
It is time for the leaders on this continent to acknowledge that NAFTA has not fulfilled its promises and go back to the drawing board. We need a new deal among the United States, Canada and Mexico. It should include a transfer of funds to Mexico for infrastructure, education and other public investments aimed at creating jobs and raising wages there. In exchange, Mexican leaders would have to agree on enforceable protections for human rights, free collective bargaining, minimum wages and other policies to promote the equitable sharing of wealth.
Such a new deal with Mexico would not be easy. But it would be far better to address the source of the problem directly than continue with the illusion that it can be solved simply by new immigration laws and ever-taller fences. So long as the Mexican economy cannot provide its people with jobs, they will keep coming.
Jeff Faux was founding president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. He is now a distinguished fellow for the institute.
Page B - 9
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/05/18/EDGDOIJKQP1.DTL
The impact of Mexico's economic woes
- Jeff Faux
Thursday, May 18, 2006
In his speech Monday night, President Bush once again ignored the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the center of the immigration debate -- Mexico, the source of more than three-quarters of illegal immigrants in America.
Like the rest of Washington, Bush talks as if the problem of illegal immigration can be solved within the borders of this country. More border guards might make crossing the frontier more difficult, and amnesty and guest-worker programs might redefine the meaning of "legal," but they will not stop -- and may well accelerate -- the growing tide of people driven north by poverty and the lack of job opportunities at home.
Some 40 percent of the more than 100 million people still living in Mexico say they would come to the United States if they had the opportunity, which can be bought for the roughly $2,500 or so it costs for a "coyote" to smuggle them across the border. Last year, at least 400 died in the attempt.
This was not supposed to happen. Thirteen years ago, when illegal immigration from Mexico across a less-protected border was half of what it is today, we were assured that the North American Free Trade Agreement would transform Mexico into a prosperous middle-class society. "There will be less illegal immigration," promised President Bill Clinton, "because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home." Mexican President Carlos Salinas told Americans it was a choice between getting Mexican tomatoes or tomato pickers.
But NAFTA did not deliver. Mexico has grown too slowly to create enough jobs for its people, and the benefits of trade have largely gone to the wealthy, making it one of the most unequal societies in Latin America. Moreover, the agreement flooded Mexico with highly subsidized U.S. and Canadian grain, driving between 1 million and 2 million Mexican farmers off the land and adding to the supply of desperate Mexicans looking for work.
NAFTA stands in vivid contrast to the experience of the economic integration of Western Europe, which actually provided for free migration among the participating nations. Originally there was great fear that Germany, France and the other rich economies would be flooded with workers from Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece. To avoid this, the European community provided funds for economic development programs, which stimulated job growth in the poorer nations and insisted on domestic reforms that assured that the economic growth would be broadly shared. The result was that the people of the poorer nations stayed home and prospered.
It is time for the leaders on this continent to acknowledge that NAFTA has not fulfilled its promises and go back to the drawing board. We need a new deal among the United States, Canada and Mexico. It should include a transfer of funds to Mexico for infrastructure, education and other public investments aimed at creating jobs and raising wages there. In exchange, Mexican leaders would have to agree on enforceable protections for human rights, free collective bargaining, minimum wages and other policies to promote the equitable sharing of wealth.
Such a new deal with Mexico would not be easy. But it would be far better to address the source of the problem directly than continue with the illusion that it can be solved simply by new immigration laws and ever-taller fences. So long as the Mexican economy cannot provide its people with jobs, they will keep coming.
Jeff Faux was founding president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. He is now a distinguished fellow for the institute.
Page B - 9
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/05/18/EDGDOIJKQP1.DTL
Sunday, May 07, 2006
On Being Black at a Latino March
On Being Black at a Latino March
By Van Jones, HuffingtonPost.com
Posted on May 5, 2006, Printed on May 7, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/35860/
At Monday's "Dia Sin Inmigrantes/Day Without Immigrants" march in San Francisco, I saw a beautiful, exciting and hopeful vision of the future of this country. I also caught a glimpse of a familiar past, fading away. And I shed a few tears for both.
From the moment I boarded the BART car, I knew this May Day march and rally would differ from the Bay Area's usual protest fare. The trains headed into downtown San Francisco were filled with working-class Latinos, all wearing white; most had kids in tow. There were few protest signs or banners, but the stars and stripes were everywhere. One tyke on my train kept trying to poke his cousin with a little American flag.
Some of the teeniest kids were wearing their older sibling's white T-shirts with their shirt hems hanging down past their knees. The children were all well-scrubbed and happy ... and very proud.
So were their parents. They knew they were part of something new, and big, and promising.
The bright mood contrasted starkly with the dreary atmosphere that chokes most protests nowadays. On this march, I saw no resigned shuffling of already defeated feet. No sea of scowls. No pierced tongues, screaming. Nor could I spy a single person dragging behind her the weighty conviction that resistance -- though obligatory -- was futile.
To the contrary. Beaming, brown-skinned families walked off those trains with their heads held high. Sure, they may have been poor, facing tough challenges in the near term. But they stepped like they were marching into a future of limitless promise and potential.
Their optimism brought tears to my eyes. And not only for the obvious reasons.
Deep inside, I was grieving for my own people. I wished that my beloved African-American community had managed, somehow, to retain our own sparkling sense of faith in a magnificent future. There was once a time when we, too, marched forward together, filled with utter confidence in the new day dawning. There was a time when we, too, believed that America's tomorrow held something bright for us ... and for our children.
But those dreams have been eaten away by the AIDS virus, laid off by down-sizers, locked out by smiling bigots, shot up by gang-bangers and buried in a corporate-run prison yard. Now we cling to Black History Month for validation or inspiration. That's because Black Present Moment is so depressing -- with worse, almost certainly, on the way.
When Katrina's floodwaters washed our problems back onto the front pages, the once-mighty Black Freedom Movement could not rise even to that occasion. Our legendary "movement" has collapsed, fallen apart. It is now a hollowed-out shell -- with our "spokespersons," both young and old, trying somehow to live off our past glories.
Meanwhile, the white-shirted future was pouring itself down Market Street, chanting "Si, se puede!"
My feelings of solidarity quickly trumped my sorrows. Thousands of people were standing up, here and across the United States, for their right to live and work in dignity in this country. Deep in my bones, I felt their pain, knew their hopes and affirmed their dreams. And just as non-blacks had supported our freedom movement in the last century, I was determined, as a non-immigrant, to give my passionate support to this righteous cause.
So I joined the crowds in the street, trying to add my voice to the thunderous chants. But I quickly discovered that, good intentions notwithstanding, political solidarity is sometimes more easily felt than expressed.
My fellow marchers started roaring out: "Zapata! Vive! La lucha! Sigue!"
I was like, Huh? What?
"Zapata! Vive! La lucha! Sigue!"
Say what?
Then louder, faster: "LaLuchaSigueSigue! ZapataViveVive! LaLuchaSigueSigue! ZapataViveVive!"
Bewildered, but undeterred, I got myself a "chant sheet." I figured that I could use one of the official written guides to keep me in the know and on track. Sure enough, the handy leaflet spelled everything out very clearly: "Las Calles Son Del Pueblo! El Pueblo Donde Esta? El Pueblo Esta En Las Calles, Exigiendo Libertad!"
Unfortunately, those words looked precisely like alphabet soup to me. I found myself desperately trying to remember back to 11th grade, wondering what sound an "x" makes in Spanish.
Finally, I had to face the sad truth: I had B.S.-ed my way through all my high school and college language requirements. I had to admit that Mrs. Savage (from fourth-period Espanol) had been right, after all: I really hadn't cheated anyone but myself.
Now I had to accept the miserable results: as an utterly monolingual English speaker, I wasn't even knowledgeable enough about the Spanish language to shout out simple phrases, during most of the protest.
Okay, I told myself. Fine. I decided instead to just walk cheerfully along, clapping in time with the drummers. But even some of the Latin rhythms were unfamiliar, strangely syncopated. I couldn't always find the beat, despite my best efforts. (Suddenly, I was filled with love and sympathy for all those arhythmic white folks whom I used to make fun of at black rallies, parties and churches. I am so sorry, y'all!)
Well, needless to say, I was on the verge of giving up. Then I found a solution: I would simply listen for any chant that had the word "Viva!" in it. For some reason, there were lots of chants with that word in it. And then, whenever appropriate, I would just raise my fist and shout "Viva!" along with the crowd, as loud as I could.
And that was pretty much all I could do. I did it for a few hours, then went home. I hope it was enough. Because, despite feeling somewhat out of place, I was absolutely thrilled to see my sisters and brothers taking the future into their own hands. By simply standing up for their own kids and grandparents -- for their own dignity and futures -- activist Latinos today are pulling the nation to a higher level of fairness and inclusion.
They are posing a simple and devastating question: should U.S. society continue to profit from the labor of 11 million people -- many of whom pick our fruit, nurse our children, clean our workplaces -- without embracing them fully, without honoring their work, without extending to them the same rights and respect we would want for ourselves?
Can we countenance or tolerate a Jim Crow system -- in brown-face -- with a shunned tier of second-class workers, enriching society but lacking legal status and protections?
Or are we willing to change our laws, and change our hearts, to embrace those upon whom our economy has come to rest? This is a simple moral challenge. The right answers are not easy, but they are obvious.
I know there will be a backlash (there always is when people push for fairness), even coming from some black folks. But I also know that the Latino-led struggle for justice and inclusion offers hope to all of us. A national conversation about the true meaning of dignity, equality, opportunity and fair play in the modern economy can ultimately benefit every American community.
I am confident that it will. Because during the two prior centuries, it was the African-American community that performed this service for the country. And we paid a high and awful cost in blood and martyrs. Unfortunately, we did not achieve all of our aims. But we did tear apartheid from pages of U.S. law books. And in the course of that struggle, we improved the lot of all Americans; expanding social programs, democratic rights and social tolerance for all people. And our efforts opened the doors for today's equality struggles. Our marching feet moved the whole nation forward.
I cannot help but mourn the loss of a black community strong enough to put this nation on its back, and carry it forward, step by step, toward justice ... as we once did. But my pain only amplifies and underscores my joy that this marvelous new force has arisen, one that is capable -- in this tough, new era -- of deepening and extending the struggle to transform and redeem.
Strong brown hands have grabbed hold of the U.S. flag. They are pulling it away from those who have monopolized it, from bullies who have abused the nation's symbols for their violent and illegitimate ends.
I am glad. Because only a mass movement with broad shoulders -- and rough hands -- will have the power to win the coming tug-of-war for the heart and soul of this country. The Latino community has birthed just such a movement. If history is any guide, as Latinos and other immigrant communities raise core questions about their children's access to education, health care, jobs and safety, every American community will benefit hugely from their efforts. Including my own.
Van Jones is executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/35860/
By Van Jones, HuffingtonPost.com
Posted on May 5, 2006, Printed on May 7, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/35860/
At Monday's "Dia Sin Inmigrantes/Day Without Immigrants" march in San Francisco, I saw a beautiful, exciting and hopeful vision of the future of this country. I also caught a glimpse of a familiar past, fading away. And I shed a few tears for both.
From the moment I boarded the BART car, I knew this May Day march and rally would differ from the Bay Area's usual protest fare. The trains headed into downtown San Francisco were filled with working-class Latinos, all wearing white; most had kids in tow. There were few protest signs or banners, but the stars and stripes were everywhere. One tyke on my train kept trying to poke his cousin with a little American flag.
Some of the teeniest kids were wearing their older sibling's white T-shirts with their shirt hems hanging down past their knees. The children were all well-scrubbed and happy ... and very proud.
So were their parents. They knew they were part of something new, and big, and promising.
The bright mood contrasted starkly with the dreary atmosphere that chokes most protests nowadays. On this march, I saw no resigned shuffling of already defeated feet. No sea of scowls. No pierced tongues, screaming. Nor could I spy a single person dragging behind her the weighty conviction that resistance -- though obligatory -- was futile.
To the contrary. Beaming, brown-skinned families walked off those trains with their heads held high. Sure, they may have been poor, facing tough challenges in the near term. But they stepped like they were marching into a future of limitless promise and potential.
Their optimism brought tears to my eyes. And not only for the obvious reasons.
Deep inside, I was grieving for my own people. I wished that my beloved African-American community had managed, somehow, to retain our own sparkling sense of faith in a magnificent future. There was once a time when we, too, marched forward together, filled with utter confidence in the new day dawning. There was a time when we, too, believed that America's tomorrow held something bright for us ... and for our children.
But those dreams have been eaten away by the AIDS virus, laid off by down-sizers, locked out by smiling bigots, shot up by gang-bangers and buried in a corporate-run prison yard. Now we cling to Black History Month for validation or inspiration. That's because Black Present Moment is so depressing -- with worse, almost certainly, on the way.
When Katrina's floodwaters washed our problems back onto the front pages, the once-mighty Black Freedom Movement could not rise even to that occasion. Our legendary "movement" has collapsed, fallen apart. It is now a hollowed-out shell -- with our "spokespersons," both young and old, trying somehow to live off our past glories.
Meanwhile, the white-shirted future was pouring itself down Market Street, chanting "Si, se puede!"
My feelings of solidarity quickly trumped my sorrows. Thousands of people were standing up, here and across the United States, for their right to live and work in dignity in this country. Deep in my bones, I felt their pain, knew their hopes and affirmed their dreams. And just as non-blacks had supported our freedom movement in the last century, I was determined, as a non-immigrant, to give my passionate support to this righteous cause.
So I joined the crowds in the street, trying to add my voice to the thunderous chants. But I quickly discovered that, good intentions notwithstanding, political solidarity is sometimes more easily felt than expressed.
My fellow marchers started roaring out: "Zapata! Vive! La lucha! Sigue!"
I was like, Huh? What?
"Zapata! Vive! La lucha! Sigue!"
Say what?
Then louder, faster: "LaLuchaSigueSigue! ZapataViveVive! LaLuchaSigueSigue! ZapataViveVive!"
Bewildered, but undeterred, I got myself a "chant sheet." I figured that I could use one of the official written guides to keep me in the know and on track. Sure enough, the handy leaflet spelled everything out very clearly: "Las Calles Son Del Pueblo! El Pueblo Donde Esta? El Pueblo Esta En Las Calles, Exigiendo Libertad!"
Unfortunately, those words looked precisely like alphabet soup to me. I found myself desperately trying to remember back to 11th grade, wondering what sound an "x" makes in Spanish.
Finally, I had to face the sad truth: I had B.S.-ed my way through all my high school and college language requirements. I had to admit that Mrs. Savage (from fourth-period Espanol) had been right, after all: I really hadn't cheated anyone but myself.
Now I had to accept the miserable results: as an utterly monolingual English speaker, I wasn't even knowledgeable enough about the Spanish language to shout out simple phrases, during most of the protest.
Okay, I told myself. Fine. I decided instead to just walk cheerfully along, clapping in time with the drummers. But even some of the Latin rhythms were unfamiliar, strangely syncopated. I couldn't always find the beat, despite my best efforts. (Suddenly, I was filled with love and sympathy for all those arhythmic white folks whom I used to make fun of at black rallies, parties and churches. I am so sorry, y'all!)
Well, needless to say, I was on the verge of giving up. Then I found a solution: I would simply listen for any chant that had the word "Viva!" in it. For some reason, there were lots of chants with that word in it. And then, whenever appropriate, I would just raise my fist and shout "Viva!" along with the crowd, as loud as I could.
And that was pretty much all I could do. I did it for a few hours, then went home. I hope it was enough. Because, despite feeling somewhat out of place, I was absolutely thrilled to see my sisters and brothers taking the future into their own hands. By simply standing up for their own kids and grandparents -- for their own dignity and futures -- activist Latinos today are pulling the nation to a higher level of fairness and inclusion.
They are posing a simple and devastating question: should U.S. society continue to profit from the labor of 11 million people -- many of whom pick our fruit, nurse our children, clean our workplaces -- without embracing them fully, without honoring their work, without extending to them the same rights and respect we would want for ourselves?
Can we countenance or tolerate a Jim Crow system -- in brown-face -- with a shunned tier of second-class workers, enriching society but lacking legal status and protections?
Or are we willing to change our laws, and change our hearts, to embrace those upon whom our economy has come to rest? This is a simple moral challenge. The right answers are not easy, but they are obvious.
I know there will be a backlash (there always is when people push for fairness), even coming from some black folks. But I also know that the Latino-led struggle for justice and inclusion offers hope to all of us. A national conversation about the true meaning of dignity, equality, opportunity and fair play in the modern economy can ultimately benefit every American community.
I am confident that it will. Because during the two prior centuries, it was the African-American community that performed this service for the country. And we paid a high and awful cost in blood and martyrs. Unfortunately, we did not achieve all of our aims. But we did tear apartheid from pages of U.S. law books. And in the course of that struggle, we improved the lot of all Americans; expanding social programs, democratic rights and social tolerance for all people. And our efforts opened the doors for today's equality struggles. Our marching feet moved the whole nation forward.
I cannot help but mourn the loss of a black community strong enough to put this nation on its back, and carry it forward, step by step, toward justice ... as we once did. But my pain only amplifies and underscores my joy that this marvelous new force has arisen, one that is capable -- in this tough, new era -- of deepening and extending the struggle to transform and redeem.
Strong brown hands have grabbed hold of the U.S. flag. They are pulling it away from those who have monopolized it, from bullies who have abused the nation's symbols for their violent and illegitimate ends.
I am glad. Because only a mass movement with broad shoulders -- and rough hands -- will have the power to win the coming tug-of-war for the heart and soul of this country. The Latino community has birthed just such a movement. If history is any guide, as Latinos and other immigrant communities raise core questions about their children's access to education, health care, jobs and safety, every American community will benefit hugely from their efforts. Including my own.
Van Jones is executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/35860/
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Tom Hayden on Immigration marches
Tom Hayden: Who Are You Calling an Immigrant?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060502_tom_hayden_immigrant/
Posted on May. 2, 2006
By Tom Hayden
I wore the multicolored Aymaran flag of Bolivia to the May Day march in Los Angeles, the same day that Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, nationalized the oil and gas fields. It seemed right to recognize the reappearance of the indigenous in the Americas. I gazed at Marcos Aguilar, one of the UCLA hunger strikers for Chicano studies in 1993. Now he stood bare-skinned and feathered, leading a traditional dance below the edifice of the Los Angeles Times. Rather than becoming assimilated into gringotopia, he was forcing the reverse, the assimilation of the Machiavellians into the new reality of L.A. Another hunger striker from those days, Cindy Montanez, was chairing the state Assembly’s rules committee. Another UCLA student, a beneficiary of ’60s outreach programs, was mayor of the city.
Contrary to most mainstream commentary, these protests were part of a continuous social movement going back many decades, even centuries. And yet the commentators, especially on the national level, once again summoned the stereotype of the lazy Mexican, the sleeping giant awakening. For years it was convenient to blame apathy and low participation rates on the Mexican-Americans and other Latinos, ignoring the racial exclusion that prevailed east of the Los Angeles River. In 1994, the same “sleeping giant” arose against Pete Wilson’s Proposition 187. It previously awoke in the 1968 high school “blowouts,” the 1968-69 Chicano moratorium and the farmworker boycotts, which were the largest in history, and, in an earlier generation, the giant awoke in the “Zoot Suit Riots” and Ed Roybal’s winning campaign for City Council. The giant never had time to sleep at all.
In the Great Depression, in the lifetimes of the parents and grandparents of today’s students, up to 600,000 Mexicans, one-third of the entire U.S. Mexican population, many of them born in the United States, were deported with their children back to Mexico, their labor no longer needed.
Out of nowhere?
There is a frightening gap between the white perception of this 50-year trauma of deportation and the experience of Mexicans and other immigrants, like the Salvadorans who were driven here by the U.S.-backed civil wars of the 1970s. Somewhere between amnesia and a self-induced lobotomy, the gap needs to be closed in the dialogue that may come of these historic protests. The mere passage of time may erase white memories and guilt, and induce acceptance among Mexicans, but it does not legitimize the occupation itself. The wound will not disappear under American flags, searchlights and border walls.
The fundamental issue still shaping attitudes down to the present is this: Either the Mexicans (and other Latinos) are immigrants to a country called the United States or the U.S. is a Machiavellian power that denies occupying one-half of Mexico for 156 years. During the 1846-48 war against Mexico, at least 50,000 Mexicans died. The fighting took place across many cities considered pure-bred American today; in Los Angeles, a revolt temporarily drove out the U.S. Army. Guerrilla resistance by Mexican fighters left a mythic legacy of those like Joaquin Murrieta and Tiburcio Vasquez, names still alive among Mexican-American students today. Meanwhile, The New York Times was declaring in 1860: “The Mexicans, ignorant and degraded as they are, [should welcome a system] founded on free trade and the right of colonization so that, after a few years of pupilege, the Mexican state would be incorporated into the Union under the same conditions as the original colonies.”
After unilaterally annexing Texas in 1845, despite massive protests, the U.S. president sent troops 100 miles into what previously was Mexican land. When the Mexicans retaliated, the U.S. declared war on the pretext that Americans had been attacked on American soil. When it ended, the U.S. took 51% of Mexico’s land, including California, where the discovery of gold had been kept secret from Mexican negotiators. At least 100,000 Mexicans and an additional 200,000 indigenous people lived on those lands. Ever since, those people and their descendants have lived in a split-consciousness similar to that of African-Americans described in W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Souls of Black Folk.” Each new generation of immigrants fuels that consciousness all over again.
Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the imposed settlement of the 1846-48 war, the inhabitants of the occupied territories were granted legal, political, educational and cultural rights as citizens, not as immigrants. Some of the earliest official documents of California were required under the treaty to be printed in Spanish and English. This treaty, which was unenforced, became the basis for later movements stretching into the 1960s, movements that gave the Southwest an Aztec name (Aztlan) and demanded the return of former land grants. It was not unlike Radical Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when Gen. Sherman’s official promise of “forty acres and a mule” was withdrawn.
Today’s demonstrations are not demanding implementation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Modern Mexican-Americans have made the legalization of undocumented workers as United States citizens their consensus demand. But there remains an unspoken difference between two states of mind regarding the meaning of the border. In every generation, immigrant workers and youth have claimed their American rights without abandoning the memory of their deeper historical ones.
A significant number of white Americans, especially among the elites, still hold to nativist definitions of American identity, in contrast to those multinational corporations that tend to be more interested in cheap foreign labor than in keeping American white.
Conservative journals like the American Outlook publish articles glorifying “the Anglosphere” as the standard of globalization (March-April 2001). Kevin Phillips is quoted in the article as still longing for an American culture whose “core thought is a kind of English revivalism.” Regarding this month’s demonstrations, the black neoconservative Thomas Sowell has criticized the “demanding” and “threatening” tone of “people who want their own turf on American soil…” (L.A. Daily News, April 29, 2006).
No one lends an Ivy League luster to the Minuteman Mentality more than Harvard University professor Samuel Huntington. A proud “Anglo-Protestant,” Huntington previously advocated the “forced urbanization” of the Vietnamese peasantry into a “Honda culture” as a formula for ending the nationalist uprising. In the ’70s, he complained that an “excess of democracy” threatened Western authorities. More recently, he formulated the strident doctrine of “the clash of civilizations,” decreeing that Islamic culture is incompatible with democratic civilization. Finally, he has weighed in on “The Hispanic Challenge,” arguing that Latino immigration is “a major potential threat to the cultural and possibly political integrity of the United States” (in Foreign Policy, March-April 2006). Huntington argues that Mexican-Americans are too close to their traditional culture to become assimilated as patriotic Americans. By this he means, of course, that they cannot become imitation WASPs, whose identity he sees as basic to the American nation. For Huntington, assimilation seems to mean submission and disappearance into the master culture, a viewpoint still held by many. We defeated you, and now you should become like us.
Largely forgotten in the current debate, too, are those among the elites who still consider Mexico itself a strategic long-term threat. The late Caspar Weinberger, a secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, wrote in 1998 of planning for a theoretical “next war” against Mexico, opting for the military option in case “it becomes necessary to go down in and try to catch [a] rebel leader in Mexico and restore democratic rule to Mexico” (interview with “Chuck Baldwin Live,” Feb. 17, 1998). The Harvard historian of Chiapas, John Womack, has written that in the 1990s “the US government, in particular the Defense Department … wanted ‘low-intensity’ warfare in Mexico” (“Rebellion in Chiapas,” Harvard, 1999).
But the U.S. has historically been the destabilizing force in Mexico, most recently with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has flooded the country with corn and other products and replaced indigenous manufacturing with the maquiladora economy, thus displacing at least hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, many of whom seek survival in el norte. Perpetuating the cycle is absolutely crucial to neo-liberal economics. But it also perpetually stimulates rebelliousness, in fact and memory, among those who take to U.S. streets today, and who shortly will be the urban majority in a new America.
As people of color, mainly immigrants, edge closer to majority status in key states, their relatives to the south are becoming nationalist, populist majorities in country after country, with interests that sharply conflict with the disintegrating U.S. Monroe Doctrine of 1823. If the populist mayor of Mexico City is elected president of Mexico this fall, NAFTA itself will die or be re-negotiated. This is the first time in many decades that the interests of Latinos in the U.S. are closely converging with the governments and people of the nations of the south. As seen even in the recent international baseball championships, the willingness of America’s major league Latino players to join the lineups of their homelands shows the fluid nature of borders and solidarity. A policy beyond the Monroe Doctrine will have to be crafted for the United States, with Latinos in the lead. As Evo Morales of Bolivia is suggesting, “another annexation is possible,” the annexation of the United States into peaceful coexistence with Latin America.
Some would argue that America must simply follow the path of previous immigrant generations, like my Famine Irish ancestors. It is true that the slum-dwelling Irish, Jews and Italians rose in time to the middle class, and the same future may lie ahead for the new immigrants. We can see signs of the past in the growing ranks of Latino trade unionists and mayors and other politicians. But the difference in the histories is race and class. If neo-liberalism has failed to widen the American middle class since 1973, how will it expand to provide decent jobs for the aspiring immigrants in today’s underclass? Is there another New Deal just over the horizon, or a hardening defense of the status quo?
Huntington’s Anglosphere is dying, if only through demographics. It is a matter of time--of when, not whether. The newcomers have neither the need nor the capacity to assimilate into a declining Anglosphere. They will remain multicultural of necessity, the hybrid multitude arising from the depths of empire and its resistance. The real question is how the rest of America, the rest of us, can assimilate and find belonging within all the Americas, where so many flags are fluttering in the gusts of self-determination.
A protest sign laid out on the lawn of Los Angeles City Hall during the May Day protest march.
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
Web site design & development by Hop Studios
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060502_tom_hayden_immigrant/
Posted on May. 2, 2006
By Tom Hayden
I wore the multicolored Aymaran flag of Bolivia to the May Day march in Los Angeles, the same day that Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, nationalized the oil and gas fields. It seemed right to recognize the reappearance of the indigenous in the Americas. I gazed at Marcos Aguilar, one of the UCLA hunger strikers for Chicano studies in 1993. Now he stood bare-skinned and feathered, leading a traditional dance below the edifice of the Los Angeles Times. Rather than becoming assimilated into gringotopia, he was forcing the reverse, the assimilation of the Machiavellians into the new reality of L.A. Another hunger striker from those days, Cindy Montanez, was chairing the state Assembly’s rules committee. Another UCLA student, a beneficiary of ’60s outreach programs, was mayor of the city.
Contrary to most mainstream commentary, these protests were part of a continuous social movement going back many decades, even centuries. And yet the commentators, especially on the national level, once again summoned the stereotype of the lazy Mexican, the sleeping giant awakening. For years it was convenient to blame apathy and low participation rates on the Mexican-Americans and other Latinos, ignoring the racial exclusion that prevailed east of the Los Angeles River. In 1994, the same “sleeping giant” arose against Pete Wilson’s Proposition 187. It previously awoke in the 1968 high school “blowouts,” the 1968-69 Chicano moratorium and the farmworker boycotts, which were the largest in history, and, in an earlier generation, the giant awoke in the “Zoot Suit Riots” and Ed Roybal’s winning campaign for City Council. The giant never had time to sleep at all.
In the Great Depression, in the lifetimes of the parents and grandparents of today’s students, up to 600,000 Mexicans, one-third of the entire U.S. Mexican population, many of them born in the United States, were deported with their children back to Mexico, their labor no longer needed.
Out of nowhere?
There is a frightening gap between the white perception of this 50-year trauma of deportation and the experience of Mexicans and other immigrants, like the Salvadorans who were driven here by the U.S.-backed civil wars of the 1970s. Somewhere between amnesia and a self-induced lobotomy, the gap needs to be closed in the dialogue that may come of these historic protests. The mere passage of time may erase white memories and guilt, and induce acceptance among Mexicans, but it does not legitimize the occupation itself. The wound will not disappear under American flags, searchlights and border walls.
The fundamental issue still shaping attitudes down to the present is this: Either the Mexicans (and other Latinos) are immigrants to a country called the United States or the U.S. is a Machiavellian power that denies occupying one-half of Mexico for 156 years. During the 1846-48 war against Mexico, at least 50,000 Mexicans died. The fighting took place across many cities considered pure-bred American today; in Los Angeles, a revolt temporarily drove out the U.S. Army. Guerrilla resistance by Mexican fighters left a mythic legacy of those like Joaquin Murrieta and Tiburcio Vasquez, names still alive among Mexican-American students today. Meanwhile, The New York Times was declaring in 1860: “The Mexicans, ignorant and degraded as they are, [should welcome a system] founded on free trade and the right of colonization so that, after a few years of pupilege, the Mexican state would be incorporated into the Union under the same conditions as the original colonies.”
After unilaterally annexing Texas in 1845, despite massive protests, the U.S. president sent troops 100 miles into what previously was Mexican land. When the Mexicans retaliated, the U.S. declared war on the pretext that Americans had been attacked on American soil. When it ended, the U.S. took 51% of Mexico’s land, including California, where the discovery of gold had been kept secret from Mexican negotiators. At least 100,000 Mexicans and an additional 200,000 indigenous people lived on those lands. Ever since, those people and their descendants have lived in a split-consciousness similar to that of African-Americans described in W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Souls of Black Folk.” Each new generation of immigrants fuels that consciousness all over again.
Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the imposed settlement of the 1846-48 war, the inhabitants of the occupied territories were granted legal, political, educational and cultural rights as citizens, not as immigrants. Some of the earliest official documents of California were required under the treaty to be printed in Spanish and English. This treaty, which was unenforced, became the basis for later movements stretching into the 1960s, movements that gave the Southwest an Aztec name (Aztlan) and demanded the return of former land grants. It was not unlike Radical Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when Gen. Sherman’s official promise of “forty acres and a mule” was withdrawn.
Today’s demonstrations are not demanding implementation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Modern Mexican-Americans have made the legalization of undocumented workers as United States citizens their consensus demand. But there remains an unspoken difference between two states of mind regarding the meaning of the border. In every generation, immigrant workers and youth have claimed their American rights without abandoning the memory of their deeper historical ones.
A significant number of white Americans, especially among the elites, still hold to nativist definitions of American identity, in contrast to those multinational corporations that tend to be more interested in cheap foreign labor than in keeping American white.
Conservative journals like the American Outlook publish articles glorifying “the Anglosphere” as the standard of globalization (March-April 2001). Kevin Phillips is quoted in the article as still longing for an American culture whose “core thought is a kind of English revivalism.” Regarding this month’s demonstrations, the black neoconservative Thomas Sowell has criticized the “demanding” and “threatening” tone of “people who want their own turf on American soil…” (L.A. Daily News, April 29, 2006).
No one lends an Ivy League luster to the Minuteman Mentality more than Harvard University professor Samuel Huntington. A proud “Anglo-Protestant,” Huntington previously advocated the “forced urbanization” of the Vietnamese peasantry into a “Honda culture” as a formula for ending the nationalist uprising. In the ’70s, he complained that an “excess of democracy” threatened Western authorities. More recently, he formulated the strident doctrine of “the clash of civilizations,” decreeing that Islamic culture is incompatible with democratic civilization. Finally, he has weighed in on “The Hispanic Challenge,” arguing that Latino immigration is “a major potential threat to the cultural and possibly political integrity of the United States” (in Foreign Policy, March-April 2006). Huntington argues that Mexican-Americans are too close to their traditional culture to become assimilated as patriotic Americans. By this he means, of course, that they cannot become imitation WASPs, whose identity he sees as basic to the American nation. For Huntington, assimilation seems to mean submission and disappearance into the master culture, a viewpoint still held by many. We defeated you, and now you should become like us.
Largely forgotten in the current debate, too, are those among the elites who still consider Mexico itself a strategic long-term threat. The late Caspar Weinberger, a secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, wrote in 1998 of planning for a theoretical “next war” against Mexico, opting for the military option in case “it becomes necessary to go down in and try to catch [a] rebel leader in Mexico and restore democratic rule to Mexico” (interview with “Chuck Baldwin Live,” Feb. 17, 1998). The Harvard historian of Chiapas, John Womack, has written that in the 1990s “the US government, in particular the Defense Department … wanted ‘low-intensity’ warfare in Mexico” (“Rebellion in Chiapas,” Harvard, 1999).
But the U.S. has historically been the destabilizing force in Mexico, most recently with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has flooded the country with corn and other products and replaced indigenous manufacturing with the maquiladora economy, thus displacing at least hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, many of whom seek survival in el norte. Perpetuating the cycle is absolutely crucial to neo-liberal economics. But it also perpetually stimulates rebelliousness, in fact and memory, among those who take to U.S. streets today, and who shortly will be the urban majority in a new America.
As people of color, mainly immigrants, edge closer to majority status in key states, their relatives to the south are becoming nationalist, populist majorities in country after country, with interests that sharply conflict with the disintegrating U.S. Monroe Doctrine of 1823. If the populist mayor of Mexico City is elected president of Mexico this fall, NAFTA itself will die or be re-negotiated. This is the first time in many decades that the interests of Latinos in the U.S. are closely converging with the governments and people of the nations of the south. As seen even in the recent international baseball championships, the willingness of America’s major league Latino players to join the lineups of their homelands shows the fluid nature of borders and solidarity. A policy beyond the Monroe Doctrine will have to be crafted for the United States, with Latinos in the lead. As Evo Morales of Bolivia is suggesting, “another annexation is possible,” the annexation of the United States into peaceful coexistence with Latin America.
Some would argue that America must simply follow the path of previous immigrant generations, like my Famine Irish ancestors. It is true that the slum-dwelling Irish, Jews and Italians rose in time to the middle class, and the same future may lie ahead for the new immigrants. We can see signs of the past in the growing ranks of Latino trade unionists and mayors and other politicians. But the difference in the histories is race and class. If neo-liberalism has failed to widen the American middle class since 1973, how will it expand to provide decent jobs for the aspiring immigrants in today’s underclass? Is there another New Deal just over the horizon, or a hardening defense of the status quo?
Huntington’s Anglosphere is dying, if only through demographics. It is a matter of time--of when, not whether. The newcomers have neither the need nor the capacity to assimilate into a declining Anglosphere. They will remain multicultural of necessity, the hybrid multitude arising from the depths of empire and its resistance. The real question is how the rest of America, the rest of us, can assimilate and find belonging within all the Americas, where so many flags are fluttering in the gusts of self-determination.
A protest sign laid out on the lawn of Los Angeles City Hall during the May Day protest march.
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
Web site design & development by Hop Studios
Monday, May 01, 2006
Sacramento's largest demonstration
The largest demonstration in Sacramento history.
I have been to many demonstration in Sacramento reaching back to the 60’s. I have marched with the UFW when they brought 15,000 to the state capitol.
Today’s march for immigrant rights in Sacramento was the largest demonstration I have ever seen. The crowds not only filled the capitol grounds, they extended over 8 blocks down the capitol mall. And from there, since the mall was full, marchers had to move over to N street to approach the capitol from the South Side. Early news reports say there were tens of thousands. Based upon prior demonstrations, there must have been at least 30,000 people here.
The entire world is experiencing a major restructuring of the global economy, directed by transnational corporations and the institutions which these corporations control (NAFTA, WTO, FTAA,GATT).
Economic policy; free trade and globalism produces massive immigration in many parts of the world. As a direct result of NAFTA , over 3 million small Mexican farmers were driven from their lands. Not surprisingly, some of them, and their children, came to the U.S. looking for work to feed their families.
While transnational capitalism produces migration, democracies need policies to respond. HR 4437 is a Republican proposal to militarize the border and to build a 700 mile wall. We have already increased border enforcement by over 800% since 1986. Militarizing the border will not work.
Neither employer sanctions, border walls, nor Minutemen will stop this migration.
A fair and just immigration policy would recognize and protect the dignity of all working people.
We need to address the economic policies which produce immigration and defeat HR 4437.
Duane Campbell
I have been to many demonstration in Sacramento reaching back to the 60’s. I have marched with the UFW when they brought 15,000 to the state capitol.
Today’s march for immigrant rights in Sacramento was the largest demonstration I have ever seen. The crowds not only filled the capitol grounds, they extended over 8 blocks down the capitol mall. And from there, since the mall was full, marchers had to move over to N street to approach the capitol from the South Side. Early news reports say there were tens of thousands. Based upon prior demonstrations, there must have been at least 30,000 people here.
The entire world is experiencing a major restructuring of the global economy, directed by transnational corporations and the institutions which these corporations control (NAFTA, WTO, FTAA,GATT).
Economic policy; free trade and globalism produces massive immigration in many parts of the world. As a direct result of NAFTA , over 3 million small Mexican farmers were driven from their lands. Not surprisingly, some of them, and their children, came to the U.S. looking for work to feed their families.
While transnational capitalism produces migration, democracies need policies to respond. HR 4437 is a Republican proposal to militarize the border and to build a 700 mile wall. We have already increased border enforcement by over 800% since 1986. Militarizing the border will not work.
Neither employer sanctions, border walls, nor Minutemen will stop this migration.
A fair and just immigration policy would recognize and protect the dignity of all working people.
We need to address the economic policies which produce immigration and defeat HR 4437.
Duane Campbell
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
When Black Folks were the Border-Crossers
When Black Folks were the
“Job-Taking Border-Crossers”
By C. Zepeda-Millán
While this nation was founded by migrants who came without papers (the Pilgrims), once the official United States of America was established, the first group of people to “break the law” by illegally crossing borders were blacks. During the time of slavery, run-away slaves fled their economically and physically oppressive situation (many times in order to reunify with family members who had previously escaped) by breaking the law and leaving their plantations in hopes of “illegally crossing” the North-South border known as the “Masson-Dixon line.” The first coyotes, the abolitionists, and other freedom fighters such as many Quakers, helped pay for and organize the crossings, housed and fed them, and knowingly broke the law by doing so. Much like the “Senseless-brenner Bill” (HR4437) proposes to do today, in 1850 white slave owning elites made it against the law to help or assist these runaways in any way (the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850). In fact, some of these racists went even further. Like todays border vigilantes (i.e. the Minutemen), militias were organized to patrol the Masson-Dixon line to keep migrants from crossing and to search for those who had already passed. Fortunately for many of these runaway slaves – who were brave enough to risk their lives in this potentially deadly journey – many people chose to side with dignity and humanity by helping them instead of obeying unjust and inhumane laws.
After slavery ended and reconstruction failed, many blacks “flooded” northern white cities. This “invasion” caused many poor and economically exploited whites to complain that blacks “brought down wages”, "were taking their jobs,” “willing to work for less”, and were “too racially and culturally different to assimilate.” Many whites believed that blacks should “go back to where they came from” (the South or Africa). Unfortunately, there weren’t any jobs in the South and many blacks were willing to endure this discrimination in order to feed their families and hopefully provide a better and freer life for their children. Working class whites failed to recognize that they were taking their anger out on the victims, while ignoring what prominent black scholar Manning Marable contends was the root cause of the “underdevelopment of black America” – capitalism. Today, while the root cause – neoliberalism – of the “underdevelopment of immigrant America” is also nowhere to be found in mainstream America’s debates about immigration, again the victims (immigrants), who are merely the effects of neoliberal policies and economic exploitation, are once again forced to endure disdain by both the oppressors (the corporations that profit from their labor) and other oppressed people (poor and working class blacks and whites).
In fact, while complaining about the effects of black migration, many poor whites supported Jim Crow laws, a dual wage system, lack of worker rights, and the exclusion of blacks from unions. They failed to realize that their support for these policies only served to further deepen racial and class divisions that if bridged, could provide the basis for a movement that could bring the economically exploitive system they both toiled under to its knees. Unfortunately, today many working-class black and white Americans have been bamboozled and fooled into making the same mistakes again by supporting politicians who promote policies that they perceive to take their interests into account, but that in reality actually produce the main source of their discontents. For example, many in the black community jokingly refer to former U.S. President Bill Clinton as “the first black president” – after all, he loves jazz and chose to locate his post-presidential office in the heart of Harlem. Yet this same Bill Clinton who many black elites and black masses – though by all means not all – venerate, joined with Republicans and business-Democrats to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which not only “served as a death sentence” to many of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, but also dramatically increased the poverty rate in Mexico and in effect contributed to the massive migration that we’ve seen over the last decade. In fact, while many contend that Mexico itself should be blamed for its economic woes, this train of thought negates the fact that ever since before the Mexican Revolution of 1910 (in which many black runway slaves in exile fought alongside Mexican peasants), American corporate interests has owned significant portions of economically vital Mexican industries (such as oil, mines, and railroads) and helped perpetuate the economic exploitation of the Mexican masses by supporting corrupt governments such as the 70 year dictatorship of the PRI party. Yet again, the effects (migrants) not the causes (neoliberal policies) are blamed.
Despite the fact that Latino immigrants already die on the job at a rate nearly 250% higher than the average American worker, the Kennedy/McCain Bill proposes to subject these “aliens” to today’s version of the “3/5th Clause” through the euphemism of “a temporary worker program” that does not guarantee a living wage, the same workers’ rights and protections as American born workers, and keeps them disenfranchised by not allowing them to take part in the political system which they are subject to. Though the bill claims to offer “a path to citizenship,” as long as the “legalization” of these laborers and the power of deportation are influenced by their employers, this program will amount to nothing more than indentured servitude. This isn’t too far from how some immigrants have already been treated in America. Let us not forget that the victims in the most resent cases of modern day slavery – whether they be in the fields of Florida or the sweatshops of California – were all immigrants of various races and ethnicities.
In conclusion, the analogies made throughout this article are not perfect. By no means am I trying to argue that the oppression that immigrants endure today equates to the horrors of the enslavement of Africans in America – they don’t. But in relative terms, undocumented people today are the most vulnerable and exploitable segment of the American workforce and as long as we allow them to remain so, all American workers suffer. The goal of this reflection is merely to attempt to demonstrate that the exploitation of our labor – that of black, brown, and all working class peoples – is embedded throughout American history, and that many of the same tactics and strategies used to keep these race and class divisions intact have not only been recycled over and over again, but also given different names and shapes in an attempt to mask them their true intent. We’re led to fight over shadows with our heads facing the ground, while the oppressive system casting them remains untouched.
Fortunately a window of opportunity has opened that we cannot afford to let pass us by. We are living in historical times. Resistance to the effects of global exploitation is spreading all across the globe. Harriet Tubman once noted that she had “freed hundreds of slaves,” but she “could have freed thousands more if only they knew they were slaves.” Today the burden of freeing those “thousands more” lies on us. It is up to us to carry her mantel and awaken all of today’s “unconscious slaves” to the fact that their discontent and oppressive conditions derive not from the many other exploited people that share the “slaves-quarters” with them, but from a racist and economically exploitive system. Thus, that history will judge us is a given. The only question for all Americans is whether we will be written in as siding with hate, dehumanization, nativism, and exploitation, or as standing up for love, compassion, dignity, freedom and justice for all? Our actions, or inactions, will determine the final outcome.
C. Zepeda-Millán is a PhD graduate student in the Department of Government at Cornell University studying Social Movements, Immigration, and Race & Ethnic Politics.
***
A Brief Historical Timeline of Black & Brown Unity Compiled by Prof. Ron Wilkins, CSDH
800 B.C. – In Mexico, Egyptian (blacks) mariners arrive and establish contact with the Olmec civilization. Complimentary beliefs and other cultural practices contribute to peaceful exchanges.
1514- In Puerto Rico, Indigenous Tainos and enslaved Africans unite and conduct the first of many uprisings against Spanish colonizers.
1546- Mexico- The first recorded conspiracy against slavery occurs in Mexico City among a coalition of enslaved Africans and Indigenous insurgents.
1552- Venezuela- 800 African slave mineworkers, strengthened by Indigenous allies, rebel.
1601- Venezuela- Indigenous peoples help blacks fight the Spanish and establish a town that lasts 200s years.
1609- Vera Cruz, Mexico- Yanga establishes the “first free pueblo” of formerly enslaved Africans in the Western Hemisphere.
1693- United States- An alliance between African runaways and rebellious indigenous tribes in Florida develops and results in a considerable cooperation and intermarriages between them.
1811- Mexico- One year into the fight for independence, African- Mexican general and revolutionary priest Jose Morelos leads what is referred to as the “Erjercito Moreno” or “Dark Army” and helps fight for Mexican independence.
1820- Mexico- the pro-independence army commanded by Black general Vicente Ramon Guerrero is joined and saved by the courageous Mexican/ Indigenous leader Pedro Ascensio.
1836- United States- During the battle of the Alamo, Mexican troops fight not only to keep the US from annexing Texas, but also to abolish the dreaded practices of slavery carried by pro-slavery White settlers. This is something they didn’t have to do, but since they were Catholic and believed slavery was wrong they helped fight to stop it. Mexicans would consistently take in and help blacks slaves that would run away from the US.
1855- Mexico- Mexican authorities refused to return enslaved runaways to the US slaveholders. Aided by Mexicans in Texas, 4,000 or more runaways escape to freedom in Mexico. The US government had to send 20% of its whole army to the Mexican border to try to stop this and intimidate the Mexicans; but they continued to help.
1857- Mexico- The Mexican constitution grants freedom to enslaved Africans who escape to Mexico and refuse to acknowledge the international treaty that included extradition of persons formerly enslaved. (Mexico basically but their buts on the line and risked being attacked by the US for refusing to send former black slaves back to their owners in the US).
1862- Mexico- A sizeable French invasion force suffers a humiliating defeat at Puebla on May 5th, at the hands of Mexican defenders who were huge underdogs. The Mexican victory, celebrated as Cinco de Mayo, is a blow to slavery in the US since the US wanted France to win because the US hoped to sell France cotton from slaves if they won.
1866- Mexico- Mexican President Benito Juarez confirms an 1851 land grant giving blacks a sizeable place of refuge at Nascimiento.
1915- United States- The “Plan de San Diego” which is discovered and stopped, called for a general uprising by Mexicans in the South West to regain their stolen land (California, Texas, etc.). Clauses in the plan address Blacks, Indigenous and Asian people which would give them their freedom and autonomy.
1960- United Nations, New York- Malcolm X hosts the Cuban delegation led by Fidel Castro during their historic visit to Harlem and the United Nations.
1964- United States- Revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara meets with Malcolm X. Che also helps freedom fighters in the Congo, Africa, to help them be liberated.
1968- United States- Working solidarity is developed in California and the Southwest among the Brown Berets, Black Panthers, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other progressive youth organization.
1972- United States- Mack Lyons, Black Florida State Director for the United Farm Workers Union (started by Cesar Chavez) negotiates with Coca Cola, owner of Minute Maid oranges for a huge contract for UFW members.
1992- United States- During LA’s April 29 Rebellion (aka LA Riots), Latino and African American neighbors, recognize their common plight, demonstrate their collective rage against continuing acts of injustices, oppression and exploitation – not against each other.
1992- United States- In recognition of 500 years of resistance and following campus clashes between the two groups, Black and Latino youth in the Los Angeles area convene a successful summit to affirm, deepen, and project their long-established unity and cooperation into the future.
2003- United States- All over the country Latino and Black youth, students, parents, activist and community members continue to work together to deal with issues such as affirmative action, 3 strikes law, prison industrial complex, crime, drugs, poor schools, and to stop Republican President Bush’s war on Iraq which, like in Vietnam, will end in the killing of many of American soldiers on the “frontlines”; where browns and blacks are always overly represented.
“Job-Taking Border-Crossers”
By C. Zepeda-Millán
While this nation was founded by migrants who came without papers (the Pilgrims), once the official United States of America was established, the first group of people to “break the law” by illegally crossing borders were blacks. During the time of slavery, run-away slaves fled their economically and physically oppressive situation (many times in order to reunify with family members who had previously escaped) by breaking the law and leaving their plantations in hopes of “illegally crossing” the North-South border known as the “Masson-Dixon line.” The first coyotes, the abolitionists, and other freedom fighters such as many Quakers, helped pay for and organize the crossings, housed and fed them, and knowingly broke the law by doing so. Much like the “Senseless-brenner Bill” (HR4437) proposes to do today, in 1850 white slave owning elites made it against the law to help or assist these runaways in any way (the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850). In fact, some of these racists went even further. Like todays border vigilantes (i.e. the Minutemen), militias were organized to patrol the Masson-Dixon line to keep migrants from crossing and to search for those who had already passed. Fortunately for many of these runaway slaves – who were brave enough to risk their lives in this potentially deadly journey – many people chose to side with dignity and humanity by helping them instead of obeying unjust and inhumane laws.
After slavery ended and reconstruction failed, many blacks “flooded” northern white cities. This “invasion” caused many poor and economically exploited whites to complain that blacks “brought down wages”, "were taking their jobs,” “willing to work for less”, and were “too racially and culturally different to assimilate.” Many whites believed that blacks should “go back to where they came from” (the South or Africa). Unfortunately, there weren’t any jobs in the South and many blacks were willing to endure this discrimination in order to feed their families and hopefully provide a better and freer life for their children. Working class whites failed to recognize that they were taking their anger out on the victims, while ignoring what prominent black scholar Manning Marable contends was the root cause of the “underdevelopment of black America” – capitalism. Today, while the root cause – neoliberalism – of the “underdevelopment of immigrant America” is also nowhere to be found in mainstream America’s debates about immigration, again the victims (immigrants), who are merely the effects of neoliberal policies and economic exploitation, are once again forced to endure disdain by both the oppressors (the corporations that profit from their labor) and other oppressed people (poor and working class blacks and whites).
In fact, while complaining about the effects of black migration, many poor whites supported Jim Crow laws, a dual wage system, lack of worker rights, and the exclusion of blacks from unions. They failed to realize that their support for these policies only served to further deepen racial and class divisions that if bridged, could provide the basis for a movement that could bring the economically exploitive system they both toiled under to its knees. Unfortunately, today many working-class black and white Americans have been bamboozled and fooled into making the same mistakes again by supporting politicians who promote policies that they perceive to take their interests into account, but that in reality actually produce the main source of their discontents. For example, many in the black community jokingly refer to former U.S. President Bill Clinton as “the first black president” – after all, he loves jazz and chose to locate his post-presidential office in the heart of Harlem. Yet this same Bill Clinton who many black elites and black masses – though by all means not all – venerate, joined with Republicans and business-Democrats to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which not only “served as a death sentence” to many of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, but also dramatically increased the poverty rate in Mexico and in effect contributed to the massive migration that we’ve seen over the last decade. In fact, while many contend that Mexico itself should be blamed for its economic woes, this train of thought negates the fact that ever since before the Mexican Revolution of 1910 (in which many black runway slaves in exile fought alongside Mexican peasants), American corporate interests has owned significant portions of economically vital Mexican industries (such as oil, mines, and railroads) and helped perpetuate the economic exploitation of the Mexican masses by supporting corrupt governments such as the 70 year dictatorship of the PRI party. Yet again, the effects (migrants) not the causes (neoliberal policies) are blamed.
Despite the fact that Latino immigrants already die on the job at a rate nearly 250% higher than the average American worker, the Kennedy/McCain Bill proposes to subject these “aliens” to today’s version of the “3/5th Clause” through the euphemism of “a temporary worker program” that does not guarantee a living wage, the same workers’ rights and protections as American born workers, and keeps them disenfranchised by not allowing them to take part in the political system which they are subject to. Though the bill claims to offer “a path to citizenship,” as long as the “legalization” of these laborers and the power of deportation are influenced by their employers, this program will amount to nothing more than indentured servitude. This isn’t too far from how some immigrants have already been treated in America. Let us not forget that the victims in the most resent cases of modern day slavery – whether they be in the fields of Florida or the sweatshops of California – were all immigrants of various races and ethnicities.
In conclusion, the analogies made throughout this article are not perfect. By no means am I trying to argue that the oppression that immigrants endure today equates to the horrors of the enslavement of Africans in America – they don’t. But in relative terms, undocumented people today are the most vulnerable and exploitable segment of the American workforce and as long as we allow them to remain so, all American workers suffer. The goal of this reflection is merely to attempt to demonstrate that the exploitation of our labor – that of black, brown, and all working class peoples – is embedded throughout American history, and that many of the same tactics and strategies used to keep these race and class divisions intact have not only been recycled over and over again, but also given different names and shapes in an attempt to mask them their true intent. We’re led to fight over shadows with our heads facing the ground, while the oppressive system casting them remains untouched.
Fortunately a window of opportunity has opened that we cannot afford to let pass us by. We are living in historical times. Resistance to the effects of global exploitation is spreading all across the globe. Harriet Tubman once noted that she had “freed hundreds of slaves,” but she “could have freed thousands more if only they knew they were slaves.” Today the burden of freeing those “thousands more” lies on us. It is up to us to carry her mantel and awaken all of today’s “unconscious slaves” to the fact that their discontent and oppressive conditions derive not from the many other exploited people that share the “slaves-quarters” with them, but from a racist and economically exploitive system. Thus, that history will judge us is a given. The only question for all Americans is whether we will be written in as siding with hate, dehumanization, nativism, and exploitation, or as standing up for love, compassion, dignity, freedom and justice for all? Our actions, or inactions, will determine the final outcome.
C. Zepeda-Millán is a PhD graduate student in the Department of Government at Cornell University studying Social Movements, Immigration, and Race & Ethnic Politics.
***
A Brief Historical Timeline of Black & Brown Unity Compiled by Prof. Ron Wilkins, CSDH
800 B.C. – In Mexico, Egyptian (blacks) mariners arrive and establish contact with the Olmec civilization. Complimentary beliefs and other cultural practices contribute to peaceful exchanges.
1514- In Puerto Rico, Indigenous Tainos and enslaved Africans unite and conduct the first of many uprisings against Spanish colonizers.
1546- Mexico- The first recorded conspiracy against slavery occurs in Mexico City among a coalition of enslaved Africans and Indigenous insurgents.
1552- Venezuela- 800 African slave mineworkers, strengthened by Indigenous allies, rebel.
1601- Venezuela- Indigenous peoples help blacks fight the Spanish and establish a town that lasts 200s years.
1609- Vera Cruz, Mexico- Yanga establishes the “first free pueblo” of formerly enslaved Africans in the Western Hemisphere.
1693- United States- An alliance between African runaways and rebellious indigenous tribes in Florida develops and results in a considerable cooperation and intermarriages between them.
1811- Mexico- One year into the fight for independence, African- Mexican general and revolutionary priest Jose Morelos leads what is referred to as the “Erjercito Moreno” or “Dark Army” and helps fight for Mexican independence.
1820- Mexico- the pro-independence army commanded by Black general Vicente Ramon Guerrero is joined and saved by the courageous Mexican/ Indigenous leader Pedro Ascensio.
1836- United States- During the battle of the Alamo, Mexican troops fight not only to keep the US from annexing Texas, but also to abolish the dreaded practices of slavery carried by pro-slavery White settlers. This is something they didn’t have to do, but since they were Catholic and believed slavery was wrong they helped fight to stop it. Mexicans would consistently take in and help blacks slaves that would run away from the US.
1855- Mexico- Mexican authorities refused to return enslaved runaways to the US slaveholders. Aided by Mexicans in Texas, 4,000 or more runaways escape to freedom in Mexico. The US government had to send 20% of its whole army to the Mexican border to try to stop this and intimidate the Mexicans; but they continued to help.
1857- Mexico- The Mexican constitution grants freedom to enslaved Africans who escape to Mexico and refuse to acknowledge the international treaty that included extradition of persons formerly enslaved. (Mexico basically but their buts on the line and risked being attacked by the US for refusing to send former black slaves back to their owners in the US).
1862- Mexico- A sizeable French invasion force suffers a humiliating defeat at Puebla on May 5th, at the hands of Mexican defenders who were huge underdogs. The Mexican victory, celebrated as Cinco de Mayo, is a blow to slavery in the US since the US wanted France to win because the US hoped to sell France cotton from slaves if they won.
1866- Mexico- Mexican President Benito Juarez confirms an 1851 land grant giving blacks a sizeable place of refuge at Nascimiento.
1915- United States- The “Plan de San Diego” which is discovered and stopped, called for a general uprising by Mexicans in the South West to regain their stolen land (California, Texas, etc.). Clauses in the plan address Blacks, Indigenous and Asian people which would give them their freedom and autonomy.
1960- United Nations, New York- Malcolm X hosts the Cuban delegation led by Fidel Castro during their historic visit to Harlem and the United Nations.
1964- United States- Revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara meets with Malcolm X. Che also helps freedom fighters in the Congo, Africa, to help them be liberated.
1968- United States- Working solidarity is developed in California and the Southwest among the Brown Berets, Black Panthers, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other progressive youth organization.
1972- United States- Mack Lyons, Black Florida State Director for the United Farm Workers Union (started by Cesar Chavez) negotiates with Coca Cola, owner of Minute Maid oranges for a huge contract for UFW members.
1992- United States- During LA’s April 29 Rebellion (aka LA Riots), Latino and African American neighbors, recognize their common plight, demonstrate their collective rage against continuing acts of injustices, oppression and exploitation – not against each other.
1992- United States- In recognition of 500 years of resistance and following campus clashes between the two groups, Black and Latino youth in the Los Angeles area convene a successful summit to affirm, deepen, and project their long-established unity and cooperation into the future.
2003- United States- All over the country Latino and Black youth, students, parents, activist and community members continue to work together to deal with issues such as affirmative action, 3 strikes law, prison industrial complex, crime, drugs, poor schools, and to stop Republican President Bush’s war on Iraq which, like in Vietnam, will end in the killing of many of American soldiers on the “frontlines”; where browns and blacks are always overly represented.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Fair and Just Immigration Reform
National Statement to Support Human and Civil Rights
for All Immigrants And to Oppose Compromise Immigration
Reform Proposals
April 2006
Fair and Just Immigration Reform for All
We stand together as immigrant, faith, social justice,
labor, peace, human and civil rights organizations and
other concerned communities to support human and civil
rights for all immigrants and to oppose the immigration
'reform' proposals presently in the U.S. Senate. We
oppose H.R. 4437, the immigration bill passed in the
House of Representatives in December, as well as all of
the compromise bills presented in the Senate.
We call upon members of Congress and the Administration
to stop masquerading these proposals as immigration
reform. We demand nothing less than immigration
policies that are fair and just, and that respect the
rights and dignity of all immigrants and other members
of our society.
The rush to reach a bipartisan accord on immigration
legislation has led to a compromise that would create
deep divisions within the immigrant community and leave
millions of undocumented immigrants in the shadows of
our country. We oppose the behind-the-scenes brokering
currently playing out in the legislative process. These
trade-offs and deals are based on election-year
campaigning and demands by business lobbyists, rather
than on the best interests and voices of immigrant
communities. We say, 'No deal!'
In a re-ignited civil rights movement, millions of
immigrants, their families, neighbors and co-workers,
along with faith and labor leaders, peace and justice
advocates, have marched and rallied in cities across
the U.S. The mobilizations have served as a wake-up
call for the whole country to acknowledge the vital
role of immigrants as co-workers, neighbors and members
of our broad society. And, as details of the current
legislative compromise have become known, the voices of
immigrant communities are rejecting the proposals for a
so-called legalization program, and are denouncing the
further erosion of human and civil rights through the
enforcement and criminalization provisions. The stakes
are considerable, and affect all of us.
This year is the 20th anniversary of the 1986
legalization and employer sanctions law, and the 10th
anniversary of the restrictive Illegal Immigration
Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. We cannot
allow the current proposals to be enacted as this
generation's flawed immigration reform legacy.
What We Want: Fair and Just Immigration Reform
Fair and just immigration reform means:
* Genuine legalization and opportunities to adjust
status for all undocumented immigrants, including youth
and farmworkers
* Preservation of due process, including restoration of
access to the courts and meaningful judicial review for
immigrants.
* No indefinite detention or expansion of mandatory
detention
* No expansion of guest worker programs
* No more wasted resources allocated to further
militarize our borders and that contribute to the
crisis of human rights and lives in the border regions
* An end to employer sanctions and electronic worker
verification systems
* The strengthening and enforcement of labor law
protections for all workers, native and foreign born
* No use of city, state or other government agencies in
the enforcement of immigration law
* No more criminalization of immigrants, or their
service providers
* Expansion of legal immigration opportunities, support
for family reunification and immediate processing of
the backlog of pending visa applications
* Elimination of harsh obstacles to immigrating,
including the HIV ban, '3 and 10 year bars,' and high
income requirements for immigrant sponsors.
The Current 'Legalization' Proposal is Unacceptable
The proposed 3-tiered temporary worker program offers
little hope for broad, inclusive legalization of
undocumented immigrants. What some are calling a 'path
to citizenship' in the last Senate bill is merely a
massive temporary worker program without worker
protections, and contains numerous hurdles that will
drastically limit the number of undocumented immigrants
who can actually legalize. Such a program would divide
communities, including mixed-status families, erode
wage and benefits standards, and place a greater burden
on safety-net services.
The Enforcement Proposals Undermine All of our Rights
Significant provisions in the current Senate proposals
would dramatically undermine a broad array of rights,
increase the criminalization of all immigrants, result
in mass deportations, and unfairly exclude millions
from eligibility for any legalization opportunity. The
expansion of expedited removal would eliminate the
right to a court hearing, while the broadened
definition of 'aggravated felony' to include many minor
offenses would result in mandatory detention and mass
deportations. The proposals also seek to reinstate
indefinite detention and increase detention facilities,
including the use of closed military bases. Encouraging
local police to enforce immigration law would not only
add an additional burden that detracts from current
responsibilities, but would discourage immigrant access
to public safety institutions.
Moreover, the increased resources to militarize the
border, which has already cost over $30 billion in the
past 12 years, has not deterred unauthorized border
crossings and instead has caused a humanitarian crisis
with the deaths of some 4,000 people in the desert.
Current border enforcement policies, laws and
practices, without provision for safe and legal entry,
have resulted in the detention and criminalization of
tens of thousands of people at a significant daily cost
to taxpayers.
The Proposals Fail to Protect Workers
The current proposals would further erode already weak
labor protections and rights for immigrants and other
workers. Immigrant workers have historically been used
as 'cheap labor' by employers and industries unwilling
to pay decent wages or to maintain reasonable working
conditions. These proposals continue in that same
shameful vein, and are designed to force and keep wages
down to compete with cheap labor suppliers globally.
Workers need more, not less, rights. A real
legalization proposal needs to be coupled with the
repeal of employer sanctions, the provision of the
landmark 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act that
has led to the criminalization of immigrant workers,
and which would be deepened through an expansion of an
employment verification system. This program has done
nothing in the last twenty years but increase
discrimination and abuse of immigrant workers.
Employers have had greater leverage to threaten and
intimidate immigrant workers, break organizing efforts,
carry out unjust firings, and lower wages and work
conditions for all working people. These abuses impact
the entire American workforce, particularly the most
vulnerable toiling in low-wage jobs such as
farmworkers, day laborers and domestic workers.
No Expansion of Guest Worker Programs
A key concern is the significant expansion of guest
worker programs found in almost all Senate proposals
and supported by the Administration. We oppose these
programs both when they are tied to legalization for
undocumented immigrants already living and working
here, and as a means for managing future flows of
immigrants into the United States. The U.S. does not
have a shortage of workers; what we have is a shortage
of employers willing to pay a living wage and maintain
decent working conditions.
Guest worker programs have been condemned by labor and
immigrant communities for their long record of
violations of labor rights and standards, including
blacklists and deportations of workers who protest. In
1964, Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chavez and other defenders
of workplace rights won the abolition of the old
Bracero guest worker program. The purpose of that
program, they said, was the creation a vulnerable
workforce in order to drive down wages and break union
organizing efforts among immigrants and non-immigrants
alike. The purpose of current proposals is the same.
Temporary, contract workers are prevented the option of
putting down roots and becoming full and equal members
of our communities.
Future migrants should not be forced to accept a
second-class status, violating our country's most basic
commitments to equality. They should be given permanent
residence status, allowing them to work and travel
freely, to exercise their labor rights, and to live as
any other member of our society.
No Compromise, No Deal on Fair and Just Immigration
Reform
In recent years, immigrant community members, including
youth and students, farmworkers and others, have
effectively organized and rallied in support of
legislative proposals to strengthen their rights and
opportunities to be equal members of this society.
Despite the loud and determined voice of immigrant
communities, advocates and supporters for fair and just
immigration reform this year, we have yet to see an
acceptable proposal from Congress. And with H.R. 4437
already passed by the House, we are very aware that any
proposal from the Senate would be subject to further
compromise in a Senate-House reconciliation process,
and would likely produce laws that would detrimentally
affect current and future immigrants for years to come.
Increased enforcement does not address the complex
issue of global migration. Employer sanctions and
beefed up border security have been in place for
decades as deterrents to migration, and yet the number
of undocumented continues to grow. The sources of
migration rest in the problems of economic and
political instability, poverty and war in migrant-
sending countries.
Despite the urgency of the immigration issue in this
country, it is clearly not just a 'domestic' issue and
our policies need to consider support for economic
stability, fair trade agreements and peace as vital to
addressing the migration of people in search of work,
survival, and safety.
We will continue to raise our voices for genuine
immigration reform that respects the rights and dignity
of all immigrants, and is fair and just. Immigrant
workers, students and families are making incredible
sacrifices to raise their voices for themselves and
future generations, in the face of recriminations and
disciplinary actions from employers and schools. As
immigrant communities continue to mobilize for their
rights, on May 1 and beyond, we will support their
right and choice to express themselves.
We pledge to increase public education efforts and the
building and mobilization of meaningful alliances, and
we will encourage and support immigrant community
leadership to advance real immigration reform. We call
upon Congress and the Administration to heed the voices
of immigrant communities demanding genuine immigration
reforms: real legalization, equitable inclusion in our
society, justice, and respect for human rights.
-------------------------------------------------------
National Immigration Statement on Fair and Just
Immigration Reform April 2006
ENDORSEMENT FORM
Please complete and email to ctactaquin@nnirr.org or
fax to (510) 465-1885
for All Immigrants And to Oppose Compromise Immigration
Reform Proposals
April 2006
Fair and Just Immigration Reform for All
We stand together as immigrant, faith, social justice,
labor, peace, human and civil rights organizations and
other concerned communities to support human and civil
rights for all immigrants and to oppose the immigration
'reform' proposals presently in the U.S. Senate. We
oppose H.R. 4437, the immigration bill passed in the
House of Representatives in December, as well as all of
the compromise bills presented in the Senate.
We call upon members of Congress and the Administration
to stop masquerading these proposals as immigration
reform. We demand nothing less than immigration
policies that are fair and just, and that respect the
rights and dignity of all immigrants and other members
of our society.
The rush to reach a bipartisan accord on immigration
legislation has led to a compromise that would create
deep divisions within the immigrant community and leave
millions of undocumented immigrants in the shadows of
our country. We oppose the behind-the-scenes brokering
currently playing out in the legislative process. These
trade-offs and deals are based on election-year
campaigning and demands by business lobbyists, rather
than on the best interests and voices of immigrant
communities. We say, 'No deal!'
In a re-ignited civil rights movement, millions of
immigrants, their families, neighbors and co-workers,
along with faith and labor leaders, peace and justice
advocates, have marched and rallied in cities across
the U.S. The mobilizations have served as a wake-up
call for the whole country to acknowledge the vital
role of immigrants as co-workers, neighbors and members
of our broad society. And, as details of the current
legislative compromise have become known, the voices of
immigrant communities are rejecting the proposals for a
so-called legalization program, and are denouncing the
further erosion of human and civil rights through the
enforcement and criminalization provisions. The stakes
are considerable, and affect all of us.
This year is the 20th anniversary of the 1986
legalization and employer sanctions law, and the 10th
anniversary of the restrictive Illegal Immigration
Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. We cannot
allow the current proposals to be enacted as this
generation's flawed immigration reform legacy.
What We Want: Fair and Just Immigration Reform
Fair and just immigration reform means:
* Genuine legalization and opportunities to adjust
status for all undocumented immigrants, including youth
and farmworkers
* Preservation of due process, including restoration of
access to the courts and meaningful judicial review for
immigrants.
* No indefinite detention or expansion of mandatory
detention
* No expansion of guest worker programs
* No more wasted resources allocated to further
militarize our borders and that contribute to the
crisis of human rights and lives in the border regions
* An end to employer sanctions and electronic worker
verification systems
* The strengthening and enforcement of labor law
protections for all workers, native and foreign born
* No use of city, state or other government agencies in
the enforcement of immigration law
* No more criminalization of immigrants, or their
service providers
* Expansion of legal immigration opportunities, support
for family reunification and immediate processing of
the backlog of pending visa applications
* Elimination of harsh obstacles to immigrating,
including the HIV ban, '3 and 10 year bars,' and high
income requirements for immigrant sponsors.
The Current 'Legalization' Proposal is Unacceptable
The proposed 3-tiered temporary worker program offers
little hope for broad, inclusive legalization of
undocumented immigrants. What some are calling a 'path
to citizenship' in the last Senate bill is merely a
massive temporary worker program without worker
protections, and contains numerous hurdles that will
drastically limit the number of undocumented immigrants
who can actually legalize. Such a program would divide
communities, including mixed-status families, erode
wage and benefits standards, and place a greater burden
on safety-net services.
The Enforcement Proposals Undermine All of our Rights
Significant provisions in the current Senate proposals
would dramatically undermine a broad array of rights,
increase the criminalization of all immigrants, result
in mass deportations, and unfairly exclude millions
from eligibility for any legalization opportunity. The
expansion of expedited removal would eliminate the
right to a court hearing, while the broadened
definition of 'aggravated felony' to include many minor
offenses would result in mandatory detention and mass
deportations. The proposals also seek to reinstate
indefinite detention and increase detention facilities,
including the use of closed military bases. Encouraging
local police to enforce immigration law would not only
add an additional burden that detracts from current
responsibilities, but would discourage immigrant access
to public safety institutions.
Moreover, the increased resources to militarize the
border, which has already cost over $30 billion in the
past 12 years, has not deterred unauthorized border
crossings and instead has caused a humanitarian crisis
with the deaths of some 4,000 people in the desert.
Current border enforcement policies, laws and
practices, without provision for safe and legal entry,
have resulted in the detention and criminalization of
tens of thousands of people at a significant daily cost
to taxpayers.
The Proposals Fail to Protect Workers
The current proposals would further erode already weak
labor protections and rights for immigrants and other
workers. Immigrant workers have historically been used
as 'cheap labor' by employers and industries unwilling
to pay decent wages or to maintain reasonable working
conditions. These proposals continue in that same
shameful vein, and are designed to force and keep wages
down to compete with cheap labor suppliers globally.
Workers need more, not less, rights. A real
legalization proposal needs to be coupled with the
repeal of employer sanctions, the provision of the
landmark 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act that
has led to the criminalization of immigrant workers,
and which would be deepened through an expansion of an
employment verification system. This program has done
nothing in the last twenty years but increase
discrimination and abuse of immigrant workers.
Employers have had greater leverage to threaten and
intimidate immigrant workers, break organizing efforts,
carry out unjust firings, and lower wages and work
conditions for all working people. These abuses impact
the entire American workforce, particularly the most
vulnerable toiling in low-wage jobs such as
farmworkers, day laborers and domestic workers.
No Expansion of Guest Worker Programs
A key concern is the significant expansion of guest
worker programs found in almost all Senate proposals
and supported by the Administration. We oppose these
programs both when they are tied to legalization for
undocumented immigrants already living and working
here, and as a means for managing future flows of
immigrants into the United States. The U.S. does not
have a shortage of workers; what we have is a shortage
of employers willing to pay a living wage and maintain
decent working conditions.
Guest worker programs have been condemned by labor and
immigrant communities for their long record of
violations of labor rights and standards, including
blacklists and deportations of workers who protest. In
1964, Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chavez and other defenders
of workplace rights won the abolition of the old
Bracero guest worker program. The purpose of that
program, they said, was the creation a vulnerable
workforce in order to drive down wages and break union
organizing efforts among immigrants and non-immigrants
alike. The purpose of current proposals is the same.
Temporary, contract workers are prevented the option of
putting down roots and becoming full and equal members
of our communities.
Future migrants should not be forced to accept a
second-class status, violating our country's most basic
commitments to equality. They should be given permanent
residence status, allowing them to work and travel
freely, to exercise their labor rights, and to live as
any other member of our society.
No Compromise, No Deal on Fair and Just Immigration
Reform
In recent years, immigrant community members, including
youth and students, farmworkers and others, have
effectively organized and rallied in support of
legislative proposals to strengthen their rights and
opportunities to be equal members of this society.
Despite the loud and determined voice of immigrant
communities, advocates and supporters for fair and just
immigration reform this year, we have yet to see an
acceptable proposal from Congress. And with H.R. 4437
already passed by the House, we are very aware that any
proposal from the Senate would be subject to further
compromise in a Senate-House reconciliation process,
and would likely produce laws that would detrimentally
affect current and future immigrants for years to come.
Increased enforcement does not address the complex
issue of global migration. Employer sanctions and
beefed up border security have been in place for
decades as deterrents to migration, and yet the number
of undocumented continues to grow. The sources of
migration rest in the problems of economic and
political instability, poverty and war in migrant-
sending countries.
Despite the urgency of the immigration issue in this
country, it is clearly not just a 'domestic' issue and
our policies need to consider support for economic
stability, fair trade agreements and peace as vital to
addressing the migration of people in search of work,
survival, and safety.
We will continue to raise our voices for genuine
immigration reform that respects the rights and dignity
of all immigrants, and is fair and just. Immigrant
workers, students and families are making incredible
sacrifices to raise their voices for themselves and
future generations, in the face of recriminations and
disciplinary actions from employers and schools. As
immigrant communities continue to mobilize for their
rights, on May 1 and beyond, we will support their
right and choice to express themselves.
We pledge to increase public education efforts and the
building and mobilization of meaningful alliances, and
we will encourage and support immigrant community
leadership to advance real immigration reform. We call
upon Congress and the Administration to heed the voices
of immigrant communities demanding genuine immigration
reforms: real legalization, equitable inclusion in our
society, justice, and respect for human rights.
-------------------------------------------------------
National Immigration Statement on Fair and Just
Immigration Reform April 2006
ENDORSEMENT FORM
Please complete and email to ctactaquin@nnirr.org or
fax to (510) 465-1885
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Immigration: next steps?
As you know, the 1968 student blow outs ( walk outs) in Los Angeles, along with the Chicano Moratorium, the UFW, and others changed the nature of Chicano politics and developed a generation of activists.
The question; what can we do to assist the current generation to grow from the massive and impressive immigrants rights demonstrations? How can we assist the formation of a new Chicano/Latino power movement?
What ideas do you have?
We want to understand the nature and the value of the mass mobilizations. The different understandings will shape how we adjust our organizations, strategies, and tactics
Duane Campbell
The question; what can we do to assist the current generation to grow from the massive and impressive immigrants rights demonstrations? How can we assist the formation of a new Chicano/Latino power movement?
What ideas do you have?
We want to understand the nature and the value of the mass mobilizations. The different understandings will shape how we adjust our organizations, strategies, and tactics
Duane Campbell
Monday, April 17, 2006
Mahoney opposes May 1 Boycott
Cardinal urges immigration supporters to avoid May 1 boycott
By CHRISTINA ALMEIDA, Associated Press Writer
Published 4:05 pm PDT Monday, April 17, 2006
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Cardinal Roger Mahony, a vocal leader of the marches against congressional attempts to crackdown on illegal immigration, does not support a planned student and worker boycott on May 1.
"Go to work. Go to school. And then join thousands of us at a major rally afterwards," Mahony said in a prepared statement.
The boycott would follow massive protests staged across the nation in recent weeks to demand reforms that help illegal immigrants stay in the country.
Immigrant students, workers and supporters are being asked to stay home as part of the boycott billed by some as "a day without an immigrant."
Many of the recent rallies have been backed by the church, organized labor and immigrant rights groups.
Some demonstrations focused on HR 4437, a House bill passed in December that would build more walls along the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalize helping undocumented immigrants and make it a felony, rather than a civil infraction, to be in the country illegally.
The Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill removing many of the punitive House provisions and adding a way for illegal immigrants to work toward U.S. citizenship. The full Senate has yet to vote on the bill.
Nativo Lopez, president of the Mexican-American Political Association, a leading organizer of the boycott, said he respected Mahony's opinion but it would not alter the plans.
"We applaud his steadfast opposition to HR 4437, and we expect to continue working together to defeat that legislation," Lopez said.
In his statement on Sunday, Mahony acknowledged the differences of opinion on the best way to rally support for immigrants. He also noted that May 1 celebrates the patron saint of workers.
"I would recommend that our Catholic parishes, schools and other entities devote time on May 1 to help our employees and students appreciate the dignity of work, the value of education and the important role immigrants play," said Mahony, who leads the nation's largest archdiocese.
Tod M. Tamberg, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said Mahony believes "participation is more effective than non-participation."
"Boycotts rarely solve the problem," Tamberg said.
The cardinal also urged employers to consider setting aside time during the day for workers to discuss immigration reform and share personal stories.
Parents should also discuss the issue at home and "persuade your students to go to school on May 1, and to remain there throughout the school day," he said.
By CHRISTINA ALMEIDA, Associated Press Writer
Published 4:05 pm PDT Monday, April 17, 2006
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Cardinal Roger Mahony, a vocal leader of the marches against congressional attempts to crackdown on illegal immigration, does not support a planned student and worker boycott on May 1.
"Go to work. Go to school. And then join thousands of us at a major rally afterwards," Mahony said in a prepared statement.
The boycott would follow massive protests staged across the nation in recent weeks to demand reforms that help illegal immigrants stay in the country.
Immigrant students, workers and supporters are being asked to stay home as part of the boycott billed by some as "a day without an immigrant."
Many of the recent rallies have been backed by the church, organized labor and immigrant rights groups.
Some demonstrations focused on HR 4437, a House bill passed in December that would build more walls along the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalize helping undocumented immigrants and make it a felony, rather than a civil infraction, to be in the country illegally.
The Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill removing many of the punitive House provisions and adding a way for illegal immigrants to work toward U.S. citizenship. The full Senate has yet to vote on the bill.
Nativo Lopez, president of the Mexican-American Political Association, a leading organizer of the boycott, said he respected Mahony's opinion but it would not alter the plans.
"We applaud his steadfast opposition to HR 4437, and we expect to continue working together to defeat that legislation," Lopez said.
In his statement on Sunday, Mahony acknowledged the differences of opinion on the best way to rally support for immigrants. He also noted that May 1 celebrates the patron saint of workers.
"I would recommend that our Catholic parishes, schools and other entities devote time on May 1 to help our employees and students appreciate the dignity of work, the value of education and the important role immigrants play," said Mahony, who leads the nation's largest archdiocese.
Tod M. Tamberg, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said Mahony believes "participation is more effective than non-participation."
"Boycotts rarely solve the problem," Tamberg said.
The cardinal also urged employers to consider setting aside time during the day for workers to discuss immigration reform and share personal stories.
Parents should also discuss the issue at home and "persuade your students to go to school on May 1, and to remain there throughout the school day," he said.
Immigration positions
The AFL_CIO position.
http://www.iamaw.org/content.cfm?cID=6892
The Catholic Church view:
www.justiceforimmigrants.org
http://www.iamaw.org/content.cfm?cID=6892
The Catholic Church view:
www.justiceforimmigrants.org
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Sacramento Immigrants' Rights Demonstration
Sacramento Joins Cities Throughout the Nation In Opposing Anti-Immigrant Legislation
By Dan Bacher
Over 10,000 immigrant rights activists marched in Sacramento on Monday, April 10 against legislation in the U.S. Senate that would make assisting an undocumented immigrant a felony. The marchers joined over a million marchers from other cities across the U.S. to stand firm against the racist scapegoating by the right wing for the economic problems caused by corporate globalization, outsourcing and Bush’s illegal war and occupation in Iraq.
A crowd of immigrant rights marchers from Davis and Yolo County united with activists and students, organized by the Campaign Against Unjust Immigration Laws, at Southside Park in Sacramento Monday. After a spirited rally with Azteca dancers and brief speeches from immigrants’ rights and civil rights organization activists, the marchers marched from the park to Capitol Malll, meeting another march at the State Capitol and stopping in front of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) offices on the mall.
“You’re not immigrants,” said Clifford Marshall, Jr., a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe from northern California, one of the four Klamath Basin tribes battling to remove dams on the Klamath River to restore salmon fisheries. “This is our country, this is our land. Our nations are with you, our relations.”
“It is wrong for immigrants from Europe to say that you can’t be here, especially when you have done no wrong to my people,” he emphasized. “We’re the owners of the land and our tribe doesn’t have any immigrant laws.”
CAUIL opposes HR4437, as well as the many problematic provisions in all bills currently pending in the U.S. senate. The current Senate immigration bill expands the exercise of executive power without judicial review and expands the term “aggravated felony,” a category of conduct that results in the worst immigration consequences, including banishment from this country for life and mandatory detention until you are removed.
In a draconian provision that parallels the most repressive provisions of the Patriot Act, the bill would make providing some types of assistance to undocumented friends or family members an “aggravated felony.”
The legislation also encourages local police to enforce federal immigration law by offering to reimburse all enforcement related expenses; provides for mandatory detention and expedited removal of immigrants caught between ports of entry and mandates expedited removal, without an opportunity of a hearing, of all those caught within 100 miles of the border who can't prove they have been here for more than 14 days; and gives the Executive Branch authority to indefinitely detain immigrants who can’t be deported, overturning two Supreme Court decisions that held such power unconstitutional.
“By much of the press coverage of the immigration legislation, you would think that the Senate is sponsoring some sort of pro-immigrant bill,” said Felicia Martinez of CAUIL. “But it’s clear that this is not true if you look at the Senate’s bill’s provisions.”
The organization held a press conference in front of Senator Feinstein’s office in San Francisco on Friday at 10:30 a.m., after their attempts by phone to arrange a meeting with Feinstein or a staff member were rebuffed. Spurred by a sizable press turnout, Matthew Walker of Feinstein’s staff finally agreed to meet with them, according to Fatima Castaneda of CAUIL. Fourteen people, including high school students and organizers, met with him and delivered 2,000 letters opposed to HR 4437 and other anti-immigrant bills.
They presented a cover letter, signed by Castaneda, Steve Iverson, Victor Rivera and Sara Farnsworth of the coalition, explaining the reason behind the letters.
“The enclosed hundreds of letters have been collected in Sacramento and nearby agricultural communities,” it stated. “In addition, we are giving you a stack of postcards written by students from the Sacramento City Unified School District. After being informed about the pending legislation at a high school conference, the students wrote these very heartfelt expressions of their concern for themselves and their families’ future. They will touch your heart.”
“…These students want an opportunity to become educated and continue living and working to make this a better country. We look forward to your leadership on this issue.”
The Coalition is planning a rally and March on May 1 starting in Southside Park as part of a national day of protests and walkouts against anti-immigrant legislation. For more details, contact the Campaign Against Unjust Immigration Laws, (916) 443-3424, zapa@zsc.org.
By Dan Bacher
Over 10,000 immigrant rights activists marched in Sacramento on Monday, April 10 against legislation in the U.S. Senate that would make assisting an undocumented immigrant a felony. The marchers joined over a million marchers from other cities across the U.S. to stand firm against the racist scapegoating by the right wing for the economic problems caused by corporate globalization, outsourcing and Bush’s illegal war and occupation in Iraq.
A crowd of immigrant rights marchers from Davis and Yolo County united with activists and students, organized by the Campaign Against Unjust Immigration Laws, at Southside Park in Sacramento Monday. After a spirited rally with Azteca dancers and brief speeches from immigrants’ rights and civil rights organization activists, the marchers marched from the park to Capitol Malll, meeting another march at the State Capitol and stopping in front of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) offices on the mall.
“You’re not immigrants,” said Clifford Marshall, Jr., a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe from northern California, one of the four Klamath Basin tribes battling to remove dams on the Klamath River to restore salmon fisheries. “This is our country, this is our land. Our nations are with you, our relations.”
“It is wrong for immigrants from Europe to say that you can’t be here, especially when you have done no wrong to my people,” he emphasized. “We’re the owners of the land and our tribe doesn’t have any immigrant laws.”
CAUIL opposes HR4437, as well as the many problematic provisions in all bills currently pending in the U.S. senate. The current Senate immigration bill expands the exercise of executive power without judicial review and expands the term “aggravated felony,” a category of conduct that results in the worst immigration consequences, including banishment from this country for life and mandatory detention until you are removed.
In a draconian provision that parallels the most repressive provisions of the Patriot Act, the bill would make providing some types of assistance to undocumented friends or family members an “aggravated felony.”
The legislation also encourages local police to enforce federal immigration law by offering to reimburse all enforcement related expenses; provides for mandatory detention and expedited removal of immigrants caught between ports of entry and mandates expedited removal, without an opportunity of a hearing, of all those caught within 100 miles of the border who can't prove they have been here for more than 14 days; and gives the Executive Branch authority to indefinitely detain immigrants who can’t be deported, overturning two Supreme Court decisions that held such power unconstitutional.
“By much of the press coverage of the immigration legislation, you would think that the Senate is sponsoring some sort of pro-immigrant bill,” said Felicia Martinez of CAUIL. “But it’s clear that this is not true if you look at the Senate’s bill’s provisions.”
The organization held a press conference in front of Senator Feinstein’s office in San Francisco on Friday at 10:30 a.m., after their attempts by phone to arrange a meeting with Feinstein or a staff member were rebuffed. Spurred by a sizable press turnout, Matthew Walker of Feinstein’s staff finally agreed to meet with them, according to Fatima Castaneda of CAUIL. Fourteen people, including high school students and organizers, met with him and delivered 2,000 letters opposed to HR 4437 and other anti-immigrant bills.
They presented a cover letter, signed by Castaneda, Steve Iverson, Victor Rivera and Sara Farnsworth of the coalition, explaining the reason behind the letters.
“The enclosed hundreds of letters have been collected in Sacramento and nearby agricultural communities,” it stated. “In addition, we are giving you a stack of postcards written by students from the Sacramento City Unified School District. After being informed about the pending legislation at a high school conference, the students wrote these very heartfelt expressions of their concern for themselves and their families’ future. They will touch your heart.”
“…These students want an opportunity to become educated and continue living and working to make this a better country. We look forward to your leadership on this issue.”
The Coalition is planning a rally and March on May 1 starting in Southside Park as part of a national day of protests and walkouts against anti-immigrant legislation. For more details, contact the Campaign Against Unjust Immigration Laws, (916) 443-3424, zapa@zsc.org.
The Senate "compromise" on immigration
On April 7,2006, The Senate Judiciary Committee offered a compromise proposal.
Among its elements:
1. A guest worker program – as opposed by organized labor.
2. Immigrants who have resided in the United States for five years and can demonstrate they have worked in the past could apply for a conditional immigrant visa. After the payment of a fine, six years of work, and proof that they are learning English, they can apply for permanent residency for themselves and their immediate family members.
3. Immigrants who have resided in the United States from 2-5 years would be issued work visas to enter a temporary worker program. During the first three years of the program, a worker would have to return to a port-of-entry to “touch base,” and have their visa stamped by proper authorities. 450,000 green cards a year would be added for this population and would allow them to adjust to permanent residence in 8-10 years.
Despite the provisions of Title VI, many harmful enforcement provisions are contained in the Senate compromise bill, including the following: mandatory detention of anyone apprehended along the border, including families, trafficking victims, asylum-seekers, victims of domestic violence, and unaccompanied children; and authorization of local law enforcement to assist federal authorities to enforce federal immigration laws.
The Senate will resume debate in April. If a bill passes the senate, it will need to be reconciled in joint committee with HR 4437 (Sensenbrenner). A final version would need to be approved by both Houses before being sent to the President.
Among its elements:
1. A guest worker program – as opposed by organized labor.
2. Immigrants who have resided in the United States for five years and can demonstrate they have worked in the past could apply for a conditional immigrant visa. After the payment of a fine, six years of work, and proof that they are learning English, they can apply for permanent residency for themselves and their immediate family members.
3. Immigrants who have resided in the United States from 2-5 years would be issued work visas to enter a temporary worker program. During the first three years of the program, a worker would have to return to a port-of-entry to “touch base,” and have their visa stamped by proper authorities. 450,000 green cards a year would be added for this population and would allow them to adjust to permanent residence in 8-10 years.
Despite the provisions of Title VI, many harmful enforcement provisions are contained in the Senate compromise bill, including the following: mandatory detention of anyone apprehended along the border, including families, trafficking victims, asylum-seekers, victims of domestic violence, and unaccompanied children; and authorization of local law enforcement to assist federal authorities to enforce federal immigration laws.
The Senate will resume debate in April. If a bill passes the senate, it will need to be reconciled in joint committee with HR 4437 (Sensenbrenner). A final version would need to be approved by both Houses before being sent to the President.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Debate: The May 1 demonstrations
Calls for boycott test immigration unity
Protest movement splinters on tactic; some fear backlash
By Myung Oak Kim And Rosa Ramirez, Rocky Mountain News
April 15, 2006
The new immigrant rights movement in Colorado, which took off with
stunning success last month, is now facing its first real test over
a planned student walkout April 19 and a work boycott May 1.
Some leaders, including a growing number of student activists, favor
the aggressive tactics of walkouts and a boycott to show the
economic power of the immigrant community.
But others caution that actions that go beyond the rallies that
Denver has seen in recent weeks could backfire and strengthen calls
for get-tough laws that would penalize illegal immigrants.
All factions in the immigrant rights movement agree on the goal - to
see Congress pass immigration reform that gives people who are in
the country illegally a path toward citizenship.
But the two upcoming events have created a disagreement over
strategy, echoing a debate that's occurring among immigrant rights
groups across the country.
That's not unusual, said Rachel Einwohner, a sociology professor at
Purdue University in Indiana. She noted that the civil rights
movement splintered into factions that took different approaches.
"People are, of course, interested in achieving justice. They're not
always going to agree on how to achieve that," she said.
Sometimes groups come back together and sometimes their split
hardens, Einwohner said, and "it can be very difficult to get the
two sides back together."
Immigrant rights took center stage at a March 25 Civic Center
demonstration that drew an estimated 50,000. Since then, there have
been a series of student walkouts and other demonstrations.
But next Wednesday, student organizers are planning to up the ante,
calling on students from at least 10 high schools and middle schools
to leave class and gather at the state Capitol for a late morning
rally, said Eddie Montoya, 19, of the youth activist group Jovenes
Unidos.
Students may stage another walkout May 1, when immigrants across
Colorado and the nation are being urged to skip work for the day to
protest legislation passed by the House of Representatives that
would criminalize undocumented immigrants and the people who help
them.
The protest movement has also hit Mexico and parts of Central
America, with some groups calling for boycotts May 1 of American-
made products.
While details of the local events are still undecided, the myriad of
organizers are struggling to unify on strategy and scrambling to
keep up with calls to action sent nationwide through Spanish-
language media, the Internet and e-mail.
"In terms of a movement, what does a movement look like, we're
seeing a very unique dynamic that I think is unprecedented in U.S.
history," said Jamila Spencer, of the Colorado Catholic Conference,
part of a coalition called the Colorado Grassroots Movement for
Immigrant Justice. "That's why this May 1st thing has the potential
to be so explosive - because you can't control it."
The idea for a May 1 work boycott emerged from local groups during
coordinated rallies April 10 and then spread across the country,
said Germonique Jones, a spokeswoman for the Center for Community
Change, an activist group based in Washington, D.C.
"There's no one main group that is really behind the May 1st event,"
she said. "The May 1st event has really taken on a life of its own."
May 1 boycott
One of the most prominent calls for labor halts has come from
Eduardo Sotelo, a popular syndicated Spanish radio host of El Piolin
Por La Manana, who can be heard on Denver-area stations.Juan Jose
Gutierrez, director of the Los Angeles-based Latino Movement USA, is
traveling the country to promote the boycott.
"We are calling on people not to go to work. No school from grammar
to college and no shopping or selling," he said. "We want to create
a day without immigrants. We fully expect to have participation
across the board."
At an April 10 rally at the state Capitol, labor organizer Paul
Lopez called on immigrants "to shut down Denver" May 1, a day some
groups are calling "The Great American Boycott of 2006."
About 40 to 60 people attended meetings Wednesday and Thursday,
which were closed to the media, to discuss the May 1 events. They
have scheduled another meeting for Monday evening at Escuela
Tlatelolco, a school at Federal Boulevard and 29th Avenue.
The groups are trying to reunite after slight divisions and lack of
communication in the planning for the April 10 candlelight vigil at
Sloan's Lake to remember immigrants who died crossing the border.
Conflicting strategies
Some organizers oppose student walkouts and work stoppages, saying
such actions would create too much anger and hurt efforts to defeat
an anti-illegal immigrant initiative heading to the November ballot
in Colorado.
Others support those tactics, saying it's time for the community to
see how much immigrants contribute to the economy.
Lourdes Norton, owner of El Defensor del Hispano, a tax preparation
and notary public business on Federal Boulevard, said she's not
opening May 1st. She said 90 percent of her clients are undocumented
Hispanic immigrants: "If I open the store, I'm telling them, I don't
support you."
Romario Delgado, president of Three Brothers Concrete Inc. in Denver
said his small company will shut down on May 1.
"I already told my foreman: Nobody is going to be working," he
said. "I'm not planning on doing any business that day also. That's
the only way to support our people (and) to stand up for them."
Delgado has already informed his customers: "They don't disagree,
and they're not disappointed. They are all with us."
But not everyone is with the demonstrators. Rallies have already
generated criticism and a boycott could turn up the volume.
Rep. Dave Schultheis, R-Colorado Springs, signed a letter earlier
this week asking President Bush to declare a state of emergency in
response to immigrant protests.
"It makes me more resolved to fight this issue," Schultheis said in
a recent interview. "They do not have rights of free speech in this
country, or any other rights for that matter. Those rights come to
us as a result of us being citizens of this country."
Bill Vandenberg, co-director of the Colorado Progressive Coalition,
which helped organize the March 25 Denver immigration rally, said an
alternative to a May 1 work stoppage is in the works. It would
involve volunteers going door to door that day to educate businesses
about immigration and seek their support in pushing for more
generous policies.
"We have a lot of people that want to do a lot of different things,"
he said. "Passionate opinions are present in every setting, and
that's a healthy thing."
Action 'harsh, drastic'
The Colorado Catholic Conference opposes student walkouts and work
boycotts "because those types of actions do not encourage reasonable
dialogue," Spencer said. "Instead, they heighten the rhetoric and
debate, and they help to polarize the debate, distracting us from
real public policy solutions."
"We encourage positive actions, prayer vigils and rallies in support
of comprehensive immigration reform," she said. "To do something
this harsh and this drastic can hurt community. It can undermine the
long-term goals."
As for the student walkout, Ricardo Martinez, an organizer of the
April 10 candlelight vigil at Sloan's Lake, supports it.
"We support that they will express their First Amendment rights,"
said Martinez, co-director of a local Latino activist group Padres
Unidos, which means parents united.
Eddie Montoya, of Jovenes Unidos, the youth arm of Padres Unidos,
said adult organizers of the pro-immigrant events have tried to
change the minds of students planning to skip class.
"People are still going to do it anyway," he said. "That message is
already out there, and that's what people are going to do."
In Denver Public Schools, officials told principals not to interfere
with students leaving school and to allow them to return. Students
who walk out will be considered truant.
And students predict more absences if Congress deadlocks on
immigration reform.
"If our demands are not met, then we're going to keep going,"
Montoya said.
kimm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2361
Copyright 2006, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
Protest movement splinters on tactic; some fear backlash
By Myung Oak Kim And Rosa Ramirez, Rocky Mountain News
April 15, 2006
The new immigrant rights movement in Colorado, which took off with
stunning success last month, is now facing its first real test over
a planned student walkout April 19 and a work boycott May 1.
Some leaders, including a growing number of student activists, favor
the aggressive tactics of walkouts and a boycott to show the
economic power of the immigrant community.
But others caution that actions that go beyond the rallies that
Denver has seen in recent weeks could backfire and strengthen calls
for get-tough laws that would penalize illegal immigrants.
All factions in the immigrant rights movement agree on the goal - to
see Congress pass immigration reform that gives people who are in
the country illegally a path toward citizenship.
But the two upcoming events have created a disagreement over
strategy, echoing a debate that's occurring among immigrant rights
groups across the country.
That's not unusual, said Rachel Einwohner, a sociology professor at
Purdue University in Indiana. She noted that the civil rights
movement splintered into factions that took different approaches.
"People are, of course, interested in achieving justice. They're not
always going to agree on how to achieve that," she said.
Sometimes groups come back together and sometimes their split
hardens, Einwohner said, and "it can be very difficult to get the
two sides back together."
Immigrant rights took center stage at a March 25 Civic Center
demonstration that drew an estimated 50,000. Since then, there have
been a series of student walkouts and other demonstrations.
But next Wednesday, student organizers are planning to up the ante,
calling on students from at least 10 high schools and middle schools
to leave class and gather at the state Capitol for a late morning
rally, said Eddie Montoya, 19, of the youth activist group Jovenes
Unidos.
Students may stage another walkout May 1, when immigrants across
Colorado and the nation are being urged to skip work for the day to
protest legislation passed by the House of Representatives that
would criminalize undocumented immigrants and the people who help
them.
The protest movement has also hit Mexico and parts of Central
America, with some groups calling for boycotts May 1 of American-
made products.
While details of the local events are still undecided, the myriad of
organizers are struggling to unify on strategy and scrambling to
keep up with calls to action sent nationwide through Spanish-
language media, the Internet and e-mail.
"In terms of a movement, what does a movement look like, we're
seeing a very unique dynamic that I think is unprecedented in U.S.
history," said Jamila Spencer, of the Colorado Catholic Conference,
part of a coalition called the Colorado Grassroots Movement for
Immigrant Justice. "That's why this May 1st thing has the potential
to be so explosive - because you can't control it."
The idea for a May 1 work boycott emerged from local groups during
coordinated rallies April 10 and then spread across the country,
said Germonique Jones, a spokeswoman for the Center for Community
Change, an activist group based in Washington, D.C.
"There's no one main group that is really behind the May 1st event,"
she said. "The May 1st event has really taken on a life of its own."
May 1 boycott
One of the most prominent calls for labor halts has come from
Eduardo Sotelo, a popular syndicated Spanish radio host of El Piolin
Por La Manana, who can be heard on Denver-area stations.Juan Jose
Gutierrez, director of the Los Angeles-based Latino Movement USA, is
traveling the country to promote the boycott.
"We are calling on people not to go to work. No school from grammar
to college and no shopping or selling," he said. "We want to create
a day without immigrants. We fully expect to have participation
across the board."
At an April 10 rally at the state Capitol, labor organizer Paul
Lopez called on immigrants "to shut down Denver" May 1, a day some
groups are calling "The Great American Boycott of 2006."
About 40 to 60 people attended meetings Wednesday and Thursday,
which were closed to the media, to discuss the May 1 events. They
have scheduled another meeting for Monday evening at Escuela
Tlatelolco, a school at Federal Boulevard and 29th Avenue.
The groups are trying to reunite after slight divisions and lack of
communication in the planning for the April 10 candlelight vigil at
Sloan's Lake to remember immigrants who died crossing the border.
Conflicting strategies
Some organizers oppose student walkouts and work stoppages, saying
such actions would create too much anger and hurt efforts to defeat
an anti-illegal immigrant initiative heading to the November ballot
in Colorado.
Others support those tactics, saying it's time for the community to
see how much immigrants contribute to the economy.
Lourdes Norton, owner of El Defensor del Hispano, a tax preparation
and notary public business on Federal Boulevard, said she's not
opening May 1st. She said 90 percent of her clients are undocumented
Hispanic immigrants: "If I open the store, I'm telling them, I don't
support you."
Romario Delgado, president of Three Brothers Concrete Inc. in Denver
said his small company will shut down on May 1.
"I already told my foreman: Nobody is going to be working," he
said. "I'm not planning on doing any business that day also. That's
the only way to support our people (and) to stand up for them."
Delgado has already informed his customers: "They don't disagree,
and they're not disappointed. They are all with us."
But not everyone is with the demonstrators. Rallies have already
generated criticism and a boycott could turn up the volume.
Rep. Dave Schultheis, R-Colorado Springs, signed a letter earlier
this week asking President Bush to declare a state of emergency in
response to immigrant protests.
"It makes me more resolved to fight this issue," Schultheis said in
a recent interview. "They do not have rights of free speech in this
country, or any other rights for that matter. Those rights come to
us as a result of us being citizens of this country."
Bill Vandenberg, co-director of the Colorado Progressive Coalition,
which helped organize the March 25 Denver immigration rally, said an
alternative to a May 1 work stoppage is in the works. It would
involve volunteers going door to door that day to educate businesses
about immigration and seek their support in pushing for more
generous policies.
"We have a lot of people that want to do a lot of different things,"
he said. "Passionate opinions are present in every setting, and
that's a healthy thing."
Action 'harsh, drastic'
The Colorado Catholic Conference opposes student walkouts and work
boycotts "because those types of actions do not encourage reasonable
dialogue," Spencer said. "Instead, they heighten the rhetoric and
debate, and they help to polarize the debate, distracting us from
real public policy solutions."
"We encourage positive actions, prayer vigils and rallies in support
of comprehensive immigration reform," she said. "To do something
this harsh and this drastic can hurt community. It can undermine the
long-term goals."
As for the student walkout, Ricardo Martinez, an organizer of the
April 10 candlelight vigil at Sloan's Lake, supports it.
"We support that they will express their First Amendment rights,"
said Martinez, co-director of a local Latino activist group Padres
Unidos, which means parents united.
Eddie Montoya, of Jovenes Unidos, the youth arm of Padres Unidos,
said adult organizers of the pro-immigrant events have tried to
change the minds of students planning to skip class.
"People are still going to do it anyway," he said. "That message is
already out there, and that's what people are going to do."
In Denver Public Schools, officials told principals not to interfere
with students leaving school and to allow them to return. Students
who walk out will be considered truant.
And students predict more absences if Congress deadlocks on
immigration reform.
"If our demands are not met, then we're going to keep going,"
Montoya said.
kimm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2361
Copyright 2006, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
Friday, April 14, 2006
Changing the Immigration Debate
Protests Turn the Tide on Immigration Debate
By Laura Carlsen
The immigration demonstrations held across the country not only marked an historic mobilization of one of the nation's most silenced sectors. They also turned the tide on a national debate that threatened the basic values and cohesion of U.S. communities.
Millions of people poured into the streets last week and their cries of protest went beyond whether or not to enact a certain piece of legislation. The fundamental demand of the marchers was for recognition within the country they call home.
Laura Carlsen directs the Americas Program of the International Relations Center, online at www.americaspolicy.org.
See new IRC commentary online at:
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3207
With printer-friendly pdf version at:
http://americas.irc-online.org/pdf/columns/0604tide.pdf
By Laura Carlsen
The immigration demonstrations held across the country not only marked an historic mobilization of one of the nation's most silenced sectors. They also turned the tide on a national debate that threatened the basic values and cohesion of U.S. communities.
Millions of people poured into the streets last week and their cries of protest went beyond whether or not to enact a certain piece of legislation. The fundamental demand of the marchers was for recognition within the country they call home.
Laura Carlsen directs the Americas Program of the International Relations Center, online at www.americaspolicy.org.
See new IRC commentary online at:
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3207
With printer-friendly pdf version at:
http://americas.irc-online.org/pdf/columns/0604tide.pdf
Friday, April 07, 2006
Congress must face reality
CONGRESS MUST FACE REALITY - IMMIGRANTS WANT EQUALITY
By David Bacon
OAKLAND, CA (4/6/06) - Senators will pat themselves on the back this week, for agreeing to their most pro-corporate, anti-immigrant bill in decades. Tens of thousands of people may be forced to leave the US as a result. Millions more would have to become braceros - guest workers on temporary visas - just to continue to labor in the jobs they've had for years.
More workplace enforcement will result in firing thousands of others, creating a climate fear that will make defending workplace rights and joining unions riskier than ever. And a border like an armed camp will continue costing the lives of hundreds of humble farmers and workers every year, crossing towards a shattered dream of a better life.
No wonder people have been in the streets for weeks, with even bigger demonstrations and marches yet to come. These are ordinary people, not activists, come out of working-class homes all over the country. A million in Los Angeles. Half a million in Chicago. Tens of thousands crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. Hunger strikers in San Francisco. Demonstrations in states where the immigrant community has been virtually invisible until now, like North Carolina, Tennessee. Border towns like Tucson. Cities from Santa Rosa to Omaha.
Everywhere, immigrants and people who support them are condemning the draconian measures passed by the House of Representatives in December, especially the provision that would make undocumented people federal felons.
But the demonstrations have a positive demand as well, one that shames especially the Senate's slight-of-hand, where second-class guest worker programs are called 'a path to legalization," and the only way families can gain legal status for their undocumented members is to spend a decade or more working as braceros. Contrary to Senate proposals for deportations and bracero visas, people carry signs demanding amnesty. These myriad marchers - families with children and grandparents in tow - have a simple alternative.
Equality.
Many unions support them. Among the most outspoken are the Teamsters in Orange County, heart of the anti-immigrant offensive, where the mayor of Costa Mesa told his police department to begin picking up immigrants who lack visas. Teamsters Local 952 says people need real legal status, not a guest worker program. A recently passed resolution condemns both Congressional proposals, because they "do nothing to remove the economic incentives that unscrupulous employers have to hire and exploit immigrant workers, and fail to really address the fact that we have 11 million undocumented workers in this country contributing to our communities."
The union "opposes any form of employer sanctions because they have historically resulted in 'employee sanctions' in the form of firings of workers for union organizing and discrimination practices on the job," and "opposes guest worker legislative proposals because such modern day 'bracero programs,' create an indentured servitude status for workers."
The AFL-CIO says the same, pointing out that if there are jobs for 400,000 braceros a year (the goal of the Senate reform bill), those immigrants should be given 400,000 green cards, or residence visas, instead, which would guarantee them equal status in their workplaces and communities. The Senate bill, the AFL-CIO says, "tears at the heart of true reform and will drive millions of hard-working immigrants further into the shadows of American society." Instead, "we should recognize immigrant workers as full members of society -- as permanent residents with full rights and full mobility that employers may not exploit."
When Senator John McCain, co-sponsor of the Senate's main guest worker plan, tried to defend it to a building trades union audience in his home state this week, he was booed. He told the construction workers that even at $50 an hour they wouldn't be willing to pick lettuce, implying that only Mexicans were willing to do farm labor. For some in the audience, McCain's remarks recalled former California Senator George Murphy, who infamously declared in the 1960s that only Mexicans would perform stoop labor because "they're built so close to the ground." Needless to say, McCain didn't actually include in his bill any wage guarantee for guestworkers, much less $50/hour (about 5 times what lettuce cutters make today.)
A concerted effort by some lobbyists is underway in Washington, however, to convince legislators that guest worker status, while unpleasant, is something immigrants themselves are prepared to accept. But outside the beltway their proposal is meeting a rising tide of rejection. In New York City, Desis Rising Up & Moving and 20 other grassroots groups formed Immigrant Communities In Action, and condemned both House and Senate bills for not halting the wave of detentions and deportations visited on Muslim communities since 9/11.
Another coalition, which includes the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, the Chinese Staff and Workers' Association, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, also rejects guestworker programs. Like the Teamsters, these groups say Congress should abolish employer sanctions instead, since they're often used to retaliate against undocumented workers who demand labor rights.
The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights criticizes both the Senate and House bills because they hold "no promise of fairness in immigration policy and would undermine the rights, economic health and safety of all immigrants and their children. Congress needs to go back to the drawing board to come up with genuine, positive and fair proposals."
Are there any such proposals before Congress?
Yes, although beltway advocates have tried to smother the most progressive of those alternatives with silence. A year ago Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and Congressional Black Caucus members introduced HR 2092, which would give permanent residence visas to undocumented people already here, and outlaw discrimination based on migrant status. Jackson Lee believes Federal policy should not pit migrants against native-born, as do guestworker programs. Her legislation would instead fund job training and creation in communities with high unemployment, so that both immigrants and non-immigrants can find work.
In the House's mad December rush to pass the Sensenbrenner bill, criminalizing the undocumented instead of legalizing them, Jackson Lee's bill couldn't even get a hearing. The Congresswoman is the ranking Democrat on the House Immigration Subcommittee. In the Senate her proposal received no more consideration, from either Democrats or Republicans. Yet her bill is the only real effort to find common ground between immigrants and the working communities of citizens and long time residents that they seek to join.
In their predictable beltway logic, guestworker advocates are counseling the huge demonstrations to feature US flags, and carry signs saying, "We are America." But covering a corporate labor scheme with patriotic rhetoric won't convince marchers to support it. Immigrants do want to be part of US society, and do want to work, but they're not likely to start holding signs saying, "I want to be a guestworker," or chanting "Braceros si! Migra no!"
Hundreds of thousands of people are saying no to Washington's repressive bills, but Congress and its coterie of beltway lobbyists clearly aren't listening. It's time for Washington to face reality. A huge outpouring of people is demanding real equality. They won't be satisfied with second-class status.
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
By David Bacon
OAKLAND, CA (4/6/06) - Senators will pat themselves on the back this week, for agreeing to their most pro-corporate, anti-immigrant bill in decades. Tens of thousands of people may be forced to leave the US as a result. Millions more would have to become braceros - guest workers on temporary visas - just to continue to labor in the jobs they've had for years.
More workplace enforcement will result in firing thousands of others, creating a climate fear that will make defending workplace rights and joining unions riskier than ever. And a border like an armed camp will continue costing the lives of hundreds of humble farmers and workers every year, crossing towards a shattered dream of a better life.
No wonder people have been in the streets for weeks, with even bigger demonstrations and marches yet to come. These are ordinary people, not activists, come out of working-class homes all over the country. A million in Los Angeles. Half a million in Chicago. Tens of thousands crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. Hunger strikers in San Francisco. Demonstrations in states where the immigrant community has been virtually invisible until now, like North Carolina, Tennessee. Border towns like Tucson. Cities from Santa Rosa to Omaha.
Everywhere, immigrants and people who support them are condemning the draconian measures passed by the House of Representatives in December, especially the provision that would make undocumented people federal felons.
But the demonstrations have a positive demand as well, one that shames especially the Senate's slight-of-hand, where second-class guest worker programs are called 'a path to legalization," and the only way families can gain legal status for their undocumented members is to spend a decade or more working as braceros. Contrary to Senate proposals for deportations and bracero visas, people carry signs demanding amnesty. These myriad marchers - families with children and grandparents in tow - have a simple alternative.
Equality.
Many unions support them. Among the most outspoken are the Teamsters in Orange County, heart of the anti-immigrant offensive, where the mayor of Costa Mesa told his police department to begin picking up immigrants who lack visas. Teamsters Local 952 says people need real legal status, not a guest worker program. A recently passed resolution condemns both Congressional proposals, because they "do nothing to remove the economic incentives that unscrupulous employers have to hire and exploit immigrant workers, and fail to really address the fact that we have 11 million undocumented workers in this country contributing to our communities."
The union "opposes any form of employer sanctions because they have historically resulted in 'employee sanctions' in the form of firings of workers for union organizing and discrimination practices on the job," and "opposes guest worker legislative proposals because such modern day 'bracero programs,' create an indentured servitude status for workers."
The AFL-CIO says the same, pointing out that if there are jobs for 400,000 braceros a year (the goal of the Senate reform bill), those immigrants should be given 400,000 green cards, or residence visas, instead, which would guarantee them equal status in their workplaces and communities. The Senate bill, the AFL-CIO says, "tears at the heart of true reform and will drive millions of hard-working immigrants further into the shadows of American society." Instead, "we should recognize immigrant workers as full members of society -- as permanent residents with full rights and full mobility that employers may not exploit."
When Senator John McCain, co-sponsor of the Senate's main guest worker plan, tried to defend it to a building trades union audience in his home state this week, he was booed. He told the construction workers that even at $50 an hour they wouldn't be willing to pick lettuce, implying that only Mexicans were willing to do farm labor. For some in the audience, McCain's remarks recalled former California Senator George Murphy, who infamously declared in the 1960s that only Mexicans would perform stoop labor because "they're built so close to the ground." Needless to say, McCain didn't actually include in his bill any wage guarantee for guestworkers, much less $50/hour (about 5 times what lettuce cutters make today.)
A concerted effort by some lobbyists is underway in Washington, however, to convince legislators that guest worker status, while unpleasant, is something immigrants themselves are prepared to accept. But outside the beltway their proposal is meeting a rising tide of rejection. In New York City, Desis Rising Up & Moving and 20 other grassroots groups formed Immigrant Communities In Action, and condemned both House and Senate bills for not halting the wave of detentions and deportations visited on Muslim communities since 9/11.
Another coalition, which includes the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, the Chinese Staff and Workers' Association, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, also rejects guestworker programs. Like the Teamsters, these groups say Congress should abolish employer sanctions instead, since they're often used to retaliate against undocumented workers who demand labor rights.
The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights criticizes both the Senate and House bills because they hold "no promise of fairness in immigration policy and would undermine the rights, economic health and safety of all immigrants and their children. Congress needs to go back to the drawing board to come up with genuine, positive and fair proposals."
Are there any such proposals before Congress?
Yes, although beltway advocates have tried to smother the most progressive of those alternatives with silence. A year ago Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and Congressional Black Caucus members introduced HR 2092, which would give permanent residence visas to undocumented people already here, and outlaw discrimination based on migrant status. Jackson Lee believes Federal policy should not pit migrants against native-born, as do guestworker programs. Her legislation would instead fund job training and creation in communities with high unemployment, so that both immigrants and non-immigrants can find work.
In the House's mad December rush to pass the Sensenbrenner bill, criminalizing the undocumented instead of legalizing them, Jackson Lee's bill couldn't even get a hearing. The Congresswoman is the ranking Democrat on the House Immigration Subcommittee. In the Senate her proposal received no more consideration, from either Democrats or Republicans. Yet her bill is the only real effort to find common ground between immigrants and the working communities of citizens and long time residents that they seek to join.
In their predictable beltway logic, guestworker advocates are counseling the huge demonstrations to feature US flags, and carry signs saying, "We are America." But covering a corporate labor scheme with patriotic rhetoric won't convince marchers to support it. Immigrants do want to be part of US society, and do want to work, but they're not likely to start holding signs saying, "I want to be a guestworker," or chanting "Braceros si! Migra no!"
Hundreds of thousands of people are saying no to Washington's repressive bills, but Congress and its coterie of beltway lobbyists clearly aren't listening. It's time for Washington to face reality. A huge outpouring of people is demanding real equality. They won't be satisfied with second-class status.
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
A comprehensive view of the immig. struggle
Toward A Comprehensive Immigration Policy
IRC | March 20, 2006
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3161
Americas Program, International Relations Center (IRC)
To summarize, a comprehensive overhaul of our immigration system would include these components:
• Occurs in the context of a national economic policy that encourages full-employment at livable wages and with respect for basic rights to organize.
• Prioritizes the entry of political refugees.
• Legalizes the presence of the large sector of unauthorized immigrants that have established roots in U.S. society and economy.
• Leaves open the possibility for guest-worker programs that do not endanger the jobs of legal U.S. residents and guarantees respect for the rights of these temporary workers.
• Determines a sustainable level of legal immigration that benefits U.S. society and economy.
• Reduces immigration visas for family reunification to ensure that any earned legalization program does not lead to large increases in legal immigration flows.
• Deemphasizes border security, and instead places the emphasis of controlling illegal immigration on institution of a worker ID system.
• Reforms U.S. foreign policy in ways that promote broad development and job creation in “sending” countries.
• Protects the human rights (with special attention to labor rights and conditions) of all U.S. residents, whether legal or not.
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3161
IRC | March 20, 2006
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3161
Americas Program, International Relations Center (IRC)
To summarize, a comprehensive overhaul of our immigration system would include these components:
• Occurs in the context of a national economic policy that encourages full-employment at livable wages and with respect for basic rights to organize.
• Prioritizes the entry of political refugees.
• Legalizes the presence of the large sector of unauthorized immigrants that have established roots in U.S. society and economy.
• Leaves open the possibility for guest-worker programs that do not endanger the jobs of legal U.S. residents and guarantees respect for the rights of these temporary workers.
• Determines a sustainable level of legal immigration that benefits U.S. society and economy.
• Reduces immigration visas for family reunification to ensure that any earned legalization program does not lead to large increases in legal immigration flows.
• Deemphasizes border security, and instead places the emphasis of controlling illegal immigration on institution of a worker ID system.
• Reforms U.S. foreign policy in ways that promote broad development and job creation in “sending” countries.
• Protects the human rights (with special attention to labor rights and conditions) of all U.S. residents, whether legal or not.
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3161
Answer claims leadership in immigration struggle
This story is taken from Politics at sacbee.com.
Boycott planned as Senate falters on immigration
By Michael Doyle -- Bee Washington Bureau
Published 2:15 am PDT Wednesday, April 5, 2006
WASHINGTON - Immigrant advocates called Tuesday for a nationwide boycott of jobs and schools on May 1, even as senators appeared stymied in their efforts to finish the immigration bill that's provoking controversy.
The proposed "Great American Boycott of 2006" is being organized by some of the same activists who rallied an estimated half-million demonstrators in Los Angeles on March 25. Now, in a bid to show nationwide clout, they want immigrants and supporters to avoid work, school, buying and selling on May 1.
"We realize that we have been absent from the political debate in Washington, although we are the voices of those most affected by the legislation," Juan Jose Gutierrez, director of Latino Movement USA, said at a Washington news conference.
The nationwide boycott is also being organized through the ANSWER Coalition, whose member groups range from the Free Palestine Alliance to the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Korea Truth Coalition.
The boycott, along with nationwide rallies scheduled for Monday, represents the loudest aspect of a debate that has meandered on Capitol Hill for the past week. On Tuesday, despite some ongoing Republican compromise negotiations, increasingly irritated senators acknowledged they lack the 60 votes necessary to pass legislation.
"I'm very frustrated right now," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist conceded early Tuesday evening, adding, "We're making no progress whatsoever."
Eight hours of debate Tuesday, interrupted by frequent quorum calls, did not result in any substantive progress and yielded only one, symbolic, vote.
One hundred amendments still await action, prompting some senators - including Republican John Cornyn of Texas - to suggest that the Senate might have to postpone action until after a two-week April recess now scheduled to start Saturday. Throughout most of Tuesday, Democrats used the Senate's procedural rules to block voting on amendments.
About the writer:
The Bee's Michael Doyle can be reached at (202) 383-0006 or mdoyle@mcclatchydc.com.
Go to: Sacbee / Back to story
Copyright © The Sacramento Bee
Hello Mr. Doyle,
Your article as published today in the Sacramento Bee with the headline Boycott planned as Senate falters on immigration has a serious problem.
To say that the national boycott is being organized through the Answer Coalition is not accurate.
It is most unfortunate that you published this claim. Please do some considerable checking prior to repeating it.
Sincerely,
Dr. Duane E. Campbell
Professor
CSU-Sacramento
author;
Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. (2004) Merrill/Prentice Hall.
Boycott planned as Senate falters on immigration
By Michael Doyle -- Bee Washington Bureau
Published 2:15 am PDT Wednesday, April 5, 2006
WASHINGTON - Immigrant advocates called Tuesday for a nationwide boycott of jobs and schools on May 1, even as senators appeared stymied in their efforts to finish the immigration bill that's provoking controversy.
The proposed "Great American Boycott of 2006" is being organized by some of the same activists who rallied an estimated half-million demonstrators in Los Angeles on March 25. Now, in a bid to show nationwide clout, they want immigrants and supporters to avoid work, school, buying and selling on May 1.
"We realize that we have been absent from the political debate in Washington, although we are the voices of those most affected by the legislation," Juan Jose Gutierrez, director of Latino Movement USA, said at a Washington news conference.
The nationwide boycott is also being organized through the ANSWER Coalition, whose member groups range from the Free Palestine Alliance to the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Korea Truth Coalition.
The boycott, along with nationwide rallies scheduled for Monday, represents the loudest aspect of a debate that has meandered on Capitol Hill for the past week. On Tuesday, despite some ongoing Republican compromise negotiations, increasingly irritated senators acknowledged they lack the 60 votes necessary to pass legislation.
"I'm very frustrated right now," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist conceded early Tuesday evening, adding, "We're making no progress whatsoever."
Eight hours of debate Tuesday, interrupted by frequent quorum calls, did not result in any substantive progress and yielded only one, symbolic, vote.
One hundred amendments still await action, prompting some senators - including Republican John Cornyn of Texas - to suggest that the Senate might have to postpone action until after a two-week April recess now scheduled to start Saturday. Throughout most of Tuesday, Democrats used the Senate's procedural rules to block voting on amendments.
About the writer:
The Bee's Michael Doyle can be reached at (202) 383-0006 or mdoyle@mcclatchydc.com.
Go to: Sacbee / Back to story
Copyright © The Sacramento Bee
Hello Mr. Doyle,
Your article as published today in the Sacramento Bee with the headline Boycott planned as Senate falters on immigration has a serious problem.
To say that the national boycott is being organized through the Answer Coalition is not accurate.
It is most unfortunate that you published this claim. Please do some considerable checking prior to repeating it.
Sincerely,
Dr. Duane E. Campbell
Professor
CSU-Sacramento
author;
Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. (2004) Merrill/Prentice Hall.
Comparison of views on Immigration bills
Positions on the immigration bills:
People for the American Way
But millions of Americans have taken to the streets in recent weeks to say "no" to Frist and his right-wing base. We need comprehensive immigration reform, not a rehashing of the enforcement-only policies that have failed us for the past twenty years!
Call upon your senators now to support the Judiciary Committee's comprehensive immigration reform proposal that includes a path to earned citizenship, an accelerated family reunification program, and a guest worker program!
The Catholic Church
This bill (Senate Judiciary) was thoughtfully crafted to address the ills of the current immigration system and provides a comprehensive approach to them, including the creation of legal avenues for family and employment-based immigration and an earned legalization program to address the millions of undocumented living in the shadows of our society.
Although some have derided this bill as providing “amnesty,” it does not. To qualify for the earned legalization program, the Judiciary Committee’s bill requires careful background checks and screening to determine eligibility; it requires applicants to pay a fine; and it requires eligible applicants to get in line behind others who are awaiting visas.
http://www.justiceforimmigrants.org/action.html
A problem area is guest workers.
Both the Kennedy-Mc Cain approach ( the Judiciary bill) and the Ag Jobs bill (sponsored by the U.F.W. of United for Change) includes guest workers.
They have reasonable rules trying to make a guest worker system viable.
The advantage is this may be the only way to legalize the 11 million
already here.
The militant position is to demand legalization now. In the real
world, that is not going to fly.
The bill just passed by the Senate Judiciary committee provides for a six year "guest worker" program. After six years, and paying a fine,
such workers would be allowed to apply for Permanent Residence status.
But, Guest worker programs have in the past increased exploitation of workers.
National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
• Past and current guest worker or bracero programs have been rife with abuses and exploitation; they divide families and violate the workers’ labor and human rights.
• Undocumented immigrant workers and their families deserve a just and fair legalization program. Any immigration reform must guarantee our civil, labor and human rights and make the border safe for communities and migrants.
• The Specter bill and H.R. 4437 will continue pouring billions into a failed strategy and guarantee that migrant deaths continue to mount. Since 1994, U.S. border control and immigration enforcement has deliberately pushed migrants to cross through the most dangerous desert and mountainous regions where they risk their lives. According to a study by the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California, the U.S. border control strategy has only caused more migrant deaths and failed to stem unauthorized border crossings. More than 4,000 migrant deaths have been recorded over the last ten years.
• The Specter bill provides a “report and deport” program: undocumented immigrants who have lived and worked in the U.S. as of January 2004 may qualify for a “conditional work authorization,” keeping them in their undocumented immigration status and deportable.
They must register with the Dept. of Homeland Security and plead “guilty” to being in the U.S. unlawfully. Those who don’t report or don’t qualify can be deported. This status can last indefinitely, and sets up these vulnerable immigrant workers as “second class” members of our society.
…….
We need to see if this last provision remains in the Judiciary Committee report.
I suspect it does. They allowed most of the enforcement provisions.
http://www.nnirr.org/
HR 4437
We need a solution, not a headline. We want effective reforms of the nation’s immigration laws, not shortsighted measures that appear tough on immigration but do not resolve the underlying problems. Only a comprehensive approach that provides a path to citizenship for current undocumented immigrants, creates new legal channels for future flows of needed immigrants, reduces family immigration backlogs, and protects worker rights will reduce undocumented immigration and bring order to our immigration system. H.R. 4437 does not take us down the path of real immigration reform.
People for the American Way
But millions of Americans have taken to the streets in recent weeks to say "no" to Frist and his right-wing base. We need comprehensive immigration reform, not a rehashing of the enforcement-only policies that have failed us for the past twenty years!
Call upon your senators now to support the Judiciary Committee's comprehensive immigration reform proposal that includes a path to earned citizenship, an accelerated family reunification program, and a guest worker program!
The Catholic Church
This bill (Senate Judiciary) was thoughtfully crafted to address the ills of the current immigration system and provides a comprehensive approach to them, including the creation of legal avenues for family and employment-based immigration and an earned legalization program to address the millions of undocumented living in the shadows of our society.
Although some have derided this bill as providing “amnesty,” it does not. To qualify for the earned legalization program, the Judiciary Committee’s bill requires careful background checks and screening to determine eligibility; it requires applicants to pay a fine; and it requires eligible applicants to get in line behind others who are awaiting visas.
http://www.justiceforimmigrants.org/action.html
A problem area is guest workers.
Both the Kennedy-Mc Cain approach ( the Judiciary bill) and the Ag Jobs bill (sponsored by the U.F.W. of United for Change) includes guest workers.
They have reasonable rules trying to make a guest worker system viable.
The advantage is this may be the only way to legalize the 11 million
already here.
The militant position is to demand legalization now. In the real
world, that is not going to fly.
The bill just passed by the Senate Judiciary committee provides for a six year "guest worker" program. After six years, and paying a fine,
such workers would be allowed to apply for Permanent Residence status.
But, Guest worker programs have in the past increased exploitation of workers.
National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
• Past and current guest worker or bracero programs have been rife with abuses and exploitation; they divide families and violate the workers’ labor and human rights.
• Undocumented immigrant workers and their families deserve a just and fair legalization program. Any immigration reform must guarantee our civil, labor and human rights and make the border safe for communities and migrants.
• The Specter bill and H.R. 4437 will continue pouring billions into a failed strategy and guarantee that migrant deaths continue to mount. Since 1994, U.S. border control and immigration enforcement has deliberately pushed migrants to cross through the most dangerous desert and mountainous regions where they risk their lives. According to a study by the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California, the U.S. border control strategy has only caused more migrant deaths and failed to stem unauthorized border crossings. More than 4,000 migrant deaths have been recorded over the last ten years.
• The Specter bill provides a “report and deport” program: undocumented immigrants who have lived and worked in the U.S. as of January 2004 may qualify for a “conditional work authorization,” keeping them in their undocumented immigration status and deportable.
They must register with the Dept. of Homeland Security and plead “guilty” to being in the U.S. unlawfully. Those who don’t report or don’t qualify can be deported. This status can last indefinitely, and sets up these vulnerable immigrant workers as “second class” members of our society.
…….
We need to see if this last provision remains in the Judiciary Committee report.
I suspect it does. They allowed most of the enforcement provisions.
http://www.nnirr.org/
HR 4437
We need a solution, not a headline. We want effective reforms of the nation’s immigration laws, not shortsighted measures that appear tough on immigration but do not resolve the underlying problems. Only a comprehensive approach that provides a path to citizenship for current undocumented immigrants, creates new legal channels for future flows of needed immigrants, reduces family immigration backlogs, and protects worker rights will reduce undocumented immigration and bring order to our immigration system. H.R. 4437 does not take us down the path of real immigration reform.
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