Immigration

Barack Obama was there on 1 May 2006. Will you join in on 2008?

AfterDowningStreet.org has an amazing historical overview on why tomorrow there will be massive demonstrations and labor union strikes all across the country : 122 years of the 8 hour week and end of child labor, 5 years of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, 3 years since the discovery of the Downing Street Minutes, 2 years since the nation-wide immigration rallies of 2006, almost 2 years ago when Nanci Pelosi and Democrats in Congress and the Senate took the impeachment of George Bush for misleading the country to war, "off the table". Yet in one of the most mindboggling examples of the Bush Administration's information war against Americans, May 1st has been declared Loyalty Day.

And here's the thing : You and I know that when it comes down to it, the war against immigrants is a war against labor which is part of a larger attack from the only people who benefit from the other kind of corporate-led violence like the occupation of Iraq.

As my friend Roberto Lovato said earlier, paraphrasing ActUP, "Silence = Death". If you are like me, you hate marches but you go to them because you know that as a symbol of solidarity in dissent you need to go.

So dust off your walking shoes and get your arse to the streets and square.

Happy Alamo Day: Let Us Honor The Alamo By Fighting Immigration

Happy Alamo Day! It's hard to believe it, but the Alamo fell 172 years ago today. As we commemorate the Alamo let us consider these words: Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes*. If you listen closely, you can hear the Alamo's warning cry. And it is warning us against an imminent threat. Sadly, few people realize the connection between national security and immigration. Let us look at the history: 3/6/1836. The Alamo. Never Forget. We live in a post 3/6/1836 world. And we need to be thinking in a post 3/6/1836 mind set. For centuries we've been unable to eliminate the debilitating terrorist campaign of Montezuma's revenge, which continues to attack our values and our bowels. Readers: don't say I didn't warn you. Because by the time a cell of undocumented Mexican gardeners drives their lawnmowers into the pentagon, it will be too late.

In all seriousness, this is my real message for all the people out there who tell "aliens" to go back to where they come from and get out of "our" country: unless your name consists of a gerund adjective followed by an animal, this actually isn't your country either!

* George Santayana actually wrote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" in The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense but, since nobody learns from history, Santayana is almost always misquoted.

Originally Posted on Citizen Orange

I was excited to find out over the weekend that David Neiwart, through his own blog and a cross-post on Firedoglake linked to me and others in the pro-migrant blogosphere in the last post of his three-part series on immigration:

The blogosphere can have a role in this change as well. There is a wealth of blogs out there dealing with immigration and Latino issues on a regular basis, and many of them feature not just important perspectives that need to be part of the conversation, but compelling and powerful writing as well.

A sampling: Migra Matters, Latina Lista, Matt Ortega,Immigration Prof Blog, The Silence of our Friends, Citizen Orange, The Unapologetic Mexican ... well, the list is long, and this one is certainly incomplete. But you get the idea. [ Source :David Neiwart]

I encourage you to use my blogroll on the right to complete that list, but now that he's finished his series I thought I'd use it as an opportunity to insert my own commentary, and hopefully build or hone on what was a massive and ambitious undertaking for Neiwart. Neiwart wrote three posts. One introducing his series, a second debunking a lot of the anti-migrant myths that exist, and a third with proposals about how to move forward.

While the first two posts were informative, I'm going to spend my time on Dave's third post, "Immigration: Looking Forward". This post is the second major migrant manifesto to emerge out of the blogosphere, coming after Duke's post that garnered a front-page spot on Daily Kos. In his post, Neiwart outlines what a "liberal program for comprehensive immigration reform" would contain:

Presented without comment, although I find it interesting that Australians use the term 'migrant' and not 'immigrant'.

This from the website :

Before you begin:

The following game is not real - it is a "Mock-Ad".

It is a 'what if' response to a challenge issued by Adnews to Amnesia.

The brief : How to change the 'negative' public perception of Migrants in Australia.

Amnesia's response is a 'part viral, part digital media campaign'

It is designed to hit at the heart of the matter and challenge perceptions in an interactive manner - we are using tested viral techniques and a game mechanic. "Mini-games' as a delivery format crosses all ages and genders and also has a suprisingly large percentage of female and older players making it perfect to carry a message.

The game is designed to appear tasteless (at first sight) in order to provoke a response by any person who has strong feelings either way - but the result of 'kicking a migrant' delivers the "real" concequnces both to our Economy and the social impact. Try it and see...

Go to the game.

ANOTHER BLOG POST exclusive to MTV, as it is part of my Street Team 08 duties! This one delves more into one of my favorite paradigms, Symbol and Essence.

Words that came to me while thinking on our many forms of warring with the Other.

Crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican, Jesus' General, and OpEdNews.

FLOR CRISOSTOMO is 28 years old. She is not a citizen of the United States, though she is trying to live her own tiny dream here. Which involves being alive, working very hard, living on extremely modest means (I can earn in an hour or so what this person does in a ten-hour a day work-week), wearing clothes, sending money to her three children, and sharing a two-bedroom apartment with four other women. Flor was dropped off in the desert after she paid a smuggler to take her away from México and up to El Norte, where she knew (as all know down below) that she could feed herself and her kids.

Crisostomo, who spoke through a translator, said she left Iguala Guerrero, Mexico, after she was unable to find a job that would allow her to buy enough food for her two boys and one girl, ages 9 to 14.

In July 2000 she paid a smuggler to take her across the border and spent three days lost in desert-like conditions before making it to Los Angeles, she said. A month later she arrived in Chicago, where she worked 10 hours a day, six days a week in an IFCO Systems site that made packing materials.

By last year, she earned about $360 a week, sending $300 to her children for food, clothes and school books, she said. To keep her own costs down, she lived with four other women in a two-bedroom Chicago apartment.

'My children's lives improve a lot as a result,' she said. 'It wasn't luxury. But it meant they could survive.'

Immigration authorities raided more than 40 IFCO sites in the U.S. in 2006 and arrested Crisostomo, along with more than 1,100 other people. The Board of Immigration Appeals last year denied Crisostomo's appeal and told her to leave the United States by Monday.

—Church harbors woman facing deportation

THIS is the ILLEGUL you speak of, Dobbs. Buchanan. Tancredo, Romney. (And many, many other less-visible US Citizens, as evidenced by far too many threads online and Letters to the Editor in print.) Even while you and I benefit from millions who live in similar poverty, fear, and persecution. This is the type of person you choose to feel NOTHING for. Because of an invisible border, and I mean the one that chokes off your own sense of proportion, reason and humanity; the mental fence that squeezes a heart until it can only stream cess, poisoning the system with septic propagandic, misanthropic, greed-fueled thought. Yes, I would indict all those who do not sympathize or empathize with her plight. Yes, I think it is a moral issue, and YES, if the American Dream doesn't include her, then I want no part of it!

For now, Flor has taken refuge in a church, a church in a land where even a "man of god" feels the need to bow to the pressure of the current deportation-only zeitgeist of the USA, the current selective-human-rights approach; actually making excuses for sheltering her.

Ms Unhinged Malkin is using data of the white supremacist organization NumbersUSA, to prove that Latinos who voted for Hillary Clinton were "corruptly" naturalized under her husband's administration.

Is that really so? How can she be so certain that all of those who voted for Clinton are naturalized immigrants as opposed to old American Latino families with no links to their countries of origin?

This is the untold story of Super Tuesday. For all the talk from Democrats and Republicans about whether immigration is or is not a wedge issue in 2008, the fact of the matter is nobody is exit polling and on the look out for recently naturalized citizen voters.

More to the point for pundits who are scrambling to feign to know all things latino, nobody is going out of their way to define demographically what "Latino voter" means.

• Is a Latino a recent immigrant?
• Is a Latino a native Northern Mexican who never immigrated to the US?
• Is it Nuyoricans only or does it include also Puerto Ricans born in the island?
• When confusing Hispanic and Latino, are we also including people born in Spain and Portugal but naturalized in the United States?
• And how many generations does it take before you loose the identity politics moniker and become a "full American"?
• Too many people are tossing around the "Latinos only vote for white Democrats or the Clintons" without qualifying the term Latino or Hispanic and that's a problem.

Quiero decirte que mi respaldo no ha sido el producto de la espontáneidad, ni del ciego optimismo.

Primero, me ha alarmado la falta de entusiasmo y apoyo que has demostrado por activistas en la red que no han sido en alguna forma aprovados por tu equipo. Aunque hablas de un movimiento, en la red veo que ese movimiento tiene que venir de tu espacio, de que tiene que darse dentro de los parámetros controlados por tu campaña.

Si los instrumentos de la red resultan en la subversión de jerarquías; haz demostrado como con el caso de John Anthony o con el repudio de la acti-red que tus esferas de influencia son inclaudicables. Que hay jerarquías pre-establecidas a tu alrededor que si se alteran, son recibidas tanto con el activo repudio de tus subalternos como con el desdén de tu silencio.

¿Cómo ha de ser éste un movimiento democrático si quieres controlar como el pueblo no dicta ni decide?

¿Cómo ha de ser transformativo, si uno no controla, desecha o reinventa tu campaña política?

¿Cómo hemos de saber que nuestras palabras valen si no haz de escuchar nuestra voz?

Sin embargo, éstas son dudas quedan rebasadas por la serie de epifanías que tu campaña me han revelado.

De cómo el miedo me llevaba a negar tu candidatura en un intento falaz de protegerte.

De cómo los grilletes del prejuicio me immobilizaban ante la mar de clases sociales, de lenguajes, de creencias y de edades que te cercan por donde pasas.

De cómo la inspiración de tus palabras alimentaba el cinismo que ha subrayado mi activismo político.

No espero que tu optimismo te convierta en un mesías.

No espero que tu mulataje borre el racismo.

No espero que tu deseo de una democracia transformativa contrareste la corrupción.

No espero que tu procedencia como hijo de un immigrante le abra las puertas a los millones que sufren los efectos del nativismo eurocentrista que infectan esta nación.

No espero que este país ni el mundo entero cambien el día que te confirmen frente a la Casa Blanca.

No.

Sin embargo ...

Oklahoma is already starting to suffer the consequences of it's tough new anti-migrant workers law :

People are just picking up and leaving :

PARK HILL, Okla. — Autumn had arrived in eastern Oklahoma, and workers at the sprawling Greenleaf Nursery were prepping for deadly frosts. They needed to ship plants, erect greenhouses and bunch trees together to protect them against the cold.

But in late October, about 40 employees disappeared from the 600-acre nursery about an hour's drive from Tulsa. "Some went to Texas, some went to Arkansas," nursery President Randy Davis says. "They just left."

Why did the workers, all immigrants, flee? "Those states don't have 1804," Davis says.

Because most legal residents are children of undocumented parents:

Supporters of 1804 say the state will benefit from illegal immigrants leaving. "That's money in our pocket," says Carol Helm of Immigration Reform for Oklahoma Now.

Not all of those leaving Oklahoma are in the USA illegally. "I've lost two housekeepers out of a staff of 12," says Joe Geis, general manager of the Sleep Inn & Suites in Edmond. "They were here legally, (but) they have family" members who were not.

Immigrant activist Blanca Thames says she has helped more than 1,000 families prepare power-of-attorney papers to protect children in case parents are deported. Many illegal immigrants have U.S.-born children who are citizens.

I see a screenplay blooming. Dealing with a favorite theme: time travel. You now think you'll steal this zeitgeisty gem from me, but you cannot because in the future, I have already finished it, and am mailing it to myself yesterday in a walnut sealed in Presidential earwax and pressurized to resist even election-year terror alerts.

OUR TALE BEGINS with a man who desperately seeks an answer to his deepest, heart-sprung questions, headed up by the quintessential and Googlicious How Do I Get Rid of the Mexicans? You see, our protagonist feels his very nation is under dire attack by the filthy mongrel hordes from the South, those who bark that most Arrogant and Sickening of Languages—Español, those who dare to settle into his beautiful nation, hellbent on storming the kitchens and fields and meatpacking plants and canning plants and steel factories or to otherwise seek to implement that most foul of Mexican behaviors: the trading of work for pay.

Let's call our protagonist "Greebey." Let's call him "Greebey Vather." Let's pronounce that "Vay-thur." Let's make his middle initial "N" and then let's give him two rags in his back pockets, one on each side. One is the confederate flag, which he never uses to blow his nose. The other is the one he uses to blow his nose. But he always carries both. No, make that confederate flag a stars N stripes. but with the circle of stars, not the rows. No, make it a Budweiser eagle bandanna, yeah, bleached from too many days in the sunlight falling upon his cracked dashboard, where it usually rests. Render Vather's bandanna Made in China. We don't need a label. Wait, make it a bleached-out watermark on the bandanna. Only Vather never looks close enough to see it.