Immigration
There are huge problems all over the country. That’s why the United States is building a wall along its border with Mexico, to contain the problems they anticipate getting worse... The wall is an atrocity. If you take a look at the Mexican border, it was once pretty open, porous in both directions. Then Clinton militarized the border for the first time with Operation Gatekeeper in 1994. Now the militarization is getting more intense. Why 1994? That was the year when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed. And presumably the United States expected that the effect of NAFTA would be that Mexican agriculture could not compete with highly subsidized U.S. agribusiness exports, so people would flock to the cities. Domestic Mexican businesses would not be able to compete with U.S. multinationals, which receive special treatment in Mexico under mislabeled trade laws that have little to do with trade but are about ensuring investor rights. The result would be a flood of people north into the United States, joined by a flood of people leaving the ruins of Central America after Reagan’s terrorist wars. So, you build a wall." Noam Chomsky: What we say Goes
Since 9/11, immigrant communities around the United States have experienced increased and intensified oppression from repressive local, state and federal legislation, law enforcement, and racist right-wing vigilantes. Following swift passage of the infamous "Sensenbrenner bill" - HR4437 - by the House of Representatives, millions of immigrants and their supporters took to the streets in unprecedented mobilizations across the country in the Spring of 2006 and again in 2007 to denounce the growing repression and to reclaim the rights of immigrant communities. Immigration policy deeply impacts civil liberties, human rights, and workers' rights, affecting families, education, health care, and labor, wages, and working conditions for all working people, both immigrant and U.S.-born, in the U.S. These historic mobilizations have demonstrated the resurgence of a grassroots immigrant rights movement. It is vital, as we move forward, to recapture what are the principles that unite us, how to overcome the ones that divide us, what strategies are needed to really push for policies and legislation that recognize and protect immigrant rights; and how immigrant communities can play a role alongside other communities and working people in the larger social and economic justice movement in the U.S. (from US Social Forum)
... if the history of hyperpowers has shown anything, it is the danger of xenophobic backlash. Time and again, past world-dominant powers have fallen precisely when their core groups turned intolerant, reasserting their "true" or "pure" identity and adopting exclusionary policies toward "unassimilable" groups. From this point of view, attempts to demonize immigrants or to attribute America's success to "Anglo-Protestant" virtues is not only misleading (neither the atomic bomb or Silicon Valley was particularly "Anglo-Protestant" in origin) but dangerous." Amy Chua "Day of Empire"
"With so many real crises facing us, why has so much national attention been focused instead on the issue of immigration? Perhaps the pundits and politicians who are spending so much energy whipping up this immigration scare are trying to distract us from some other, more pressing, national—and global—issues." Avi Chomsky They Take Our Jobs and 20 other myths about immigration. Beacon Press
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Thomas Pynchon quoted by Al Gore in 'Assault on Reason'.
"...capital is welcome almost everywhere, while foreign workers are not. All kinds of tricks and schemes are employed worldwide to attract investments, but most countries fear migrating workers and often slam the immigration door in their faces. Some even bring in the military to defend their homeland against the perceived threat of migratory workers. Governments worldwide are determined to stop, or at least limit, the global migration of workers." Gabor Steingart in his book the War for Wealth
"...if history proves nothing else, it is this: Walls don't work. The Great Wall of China didn't work. The Berlin Wall didn't work. The West Bank Barrier won't work. Walls never work. Walls are a medieval solution to a twenty-first-century problem. Mongols invade them. Escapees tunnel under them. Television beams over them. Today, as National Guard troops patrol the rivers from Arizona to Iraq, the United States isn't building a wall. It is building a prison." Vicente Fox, Revolution of Hope.
Links
America's Secret Ice Castles. the Nation: 1/4/2010
Iraqi Refugees in the United States: In Dire Straits
National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
The Problem is Free Trade, Not Immigrants
The Price Of Intolerance (11/27/2011)
Countries Must Plan For Climate Refugees (10/28/2011)
The Right-Wing Hardliner Immigration Approach Would Create a Police State -- Is That What Those Supposed Freedom Lovers Want? (8/11/2010)
More than 300,000 immigrants languish in detention centers around the country. Why are they there - and who is profiting from their imprisonment? (8/1/2010)
Illegal immigration is yet another Republican wedge issue, a disguised appeal to racism, and a shameless distraction from more pressing problems. It allows Republicans to distance themselves from the failures of the Bush administration and, at the same time, to attack Democrats. It is a continuation of the Republican war on the poor (R's are always ready to go to war, whether it be with drugs, terrorism, Islam, Iraq, China, Korea, illegal immigrants, or even the US population.) It is a not too subtle appeal to racism, and it is a very important source of business for the prison-industrial complex. (Boeing's share of the wall along the Mexican border is said to be around $2 billion.)
There is some evidence that Republicans current initiative on immigration is really a block for consideration of mitigation of climate change.
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LAWRENCE DOWNES Two Rallies |
| nytimes.com - A few hundred Tea Party-types clustered on the south end of the Capitol on Sunday, trying to kill health care reform, fouling the crisp spring air with shouts of violence and loathing. At the other end of the National Mall, many tens of thousands of immigrants and allies were pressing for immigration reform. If anyone has reason to fear government, it is immigrants like those at the rally, which Mr. Obama addressed via a jumbo TV screen. The government has violently invaded their lives, broken into homes, torn parents from children and sent them away to distant prisons. They have law-scoffing sheriffs and brutal employers and unjust laws aiming just at them. This is a fear the Kill-the-Billers will never know. No matter how darkly they loathe Medicare, unemployment insurance or Social Security, the safety net is theirs for life. |
Six Myths About Immigration (5/20/2010)
Beyond Reasonable Suspicion (5/12/2010)
Desertion in the Desert (4/20/2010)
About Immigration to the United States
Indentured Servants, Circa 2009 (3/18/2009)
About Health Care for Immigrants (3/17/2009)
Handling Immigrants the Republican way: like cattle (5/14/2008)
U.S. Violates International Law by Failing to Enforce Laws Protecting Rights of Mexican Workers
Political Economy of International Migration
Immigrant Prison Deaths (5/6/2008)
Immigrants Deported by US Hospitals (8/3/2008)
Fear and Loathing in Prime Time: Immigration Myths and Cable News
Careless Detention (Washington Post Series)
Noam Chomsky on immigration. (video)
War on Newcomer Aliens in the US.
Immigrant Crackdowns are building the national security state
Vicente Fox: Walls don't work.
A Foolish Immigration Purge
(3/27/2008) The New York Times's editors write: "Leave it to the Bush administration to throw thousands of law-abiding American workers and companies off a cliff in perilous economic times. That would be the effect of its decision to press ahead with a bad idea: to force businesses to fire employees whose names don't match the Social Security database. The purge is part of a campaign - along with scattershot workplace raids and the partial border fence - to make a show of tackling the broken immigration system."Republican Family Values