Immigration

Denying due process to people without US citizenship, residency papers, green cards or a visa is becoming a business racket for private prisons and private security (aka paramilitary) companies.

The more people are thrown into those jails, the more money the concentration camps make.

Welcome to the new American economy.

h/t American Humanity

I just wrote a post about López Lomong for Awearness blog over at Kenneth Cole's. I am waiting for it to be published. It's a bit of a recap of his life as a Lost Boy from Sudán and now, not only an Olympic athlete, but an American citizen and the flag bearer for the US Olympic team in China.

While writing his Cinderella story I couldn't help but think of Hiu Lui Ng's horror story.

Hiu Lui Ng died in the custody of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs' Enforcement agency. Actually, he was documented : He had a job as a computer programmer. He had a wife and children and a home in Queens.

His crime? His visa had expired.

The white supremacist created Center for Immigration Studies has release a "study" that says immigration causes global warming.

Yeah. Immigrants are melting the polar ice caps.

They have such incredibly stupid "data" includes factors like "immigrant emissions". Tell me they're not talking about José's and Tanya's farts?

Included is the press release they're releasing today. I want you to come back to this post and link to each article that appears on traditional media. Because it's not the first time the likes of The New York Times uses this white supremacist group as a source for "experts".

CAUTION : Stupidity appears after the jump.

Kyle has compiled a whole collection of images from white supremacist rallies against immigrants. Here's the lede:

The Sanctuary:: 5 English Lessons From the Anti-Immigrant Movement: "Any nativist will tell you that polls show 1,000% of 'Mericans support speaking only English in the United States of America. It doesn't matter if the U.S. can't even understand the languages of the countries it goes to war with (you don't need to understand people to shoot at them). If people can't speak English like they're supposed to, they're not real 'Mericans.

Using this iron-clad logic, I thought I'd compile a list of five English lessons for those that want to learn to how to be a real 'Merican and speak English."

The results are HYSTERICAL. Go see the whole collection, NOW!

(Via The Sanctuary:: 5 English Lessons From the Anti-Immigrant Movement.)

ON JULY FIFTEEN OF 2008, Rhode Island Republican Governor Donald L. Carcieri signed an executive "Illegal Immigration Control Order" [pdf] into law. It begins with some storytelling.

WHEREAS, most Rhode Islanders and most Americans are descendants of immigrants from all regions of the world

Stop. Most are, true. And you know who aren't "descendants of immigrants from all regions of the world"?

Mexicans, for one. We are not "immigrants" on this land. We are Indians who have been invaded and occupied (just as Iraq has) by Imperialist Euro-forces, and who eventually blended with our greedy, self-justifying, resource-thirsting overlords by means of rape, occupation, an eventual perverse desire to blend and be like the rulers, and in time simply because we've all been living on the same land since then.

Not immigrants. Indians. People indigenous to the continent long before map lines were drawn by invading forces.

Farmers. Workers. Campesinos. For the longest time, we (this is how my nanita and abuelo made their living with my father) have been migrating farmers on this land, for thousands of years we have been quien lo trabajo esta tierra. And for all this time, we have been moving about with the seasons and the flow, just like rivers, just like pollen, just like water through the soil.

It was los perfumados with their WHEREAS clauses who blew in here with butchery and deception and greed and now want to tell stories about opportunity and ownership.

The New York Times uses an Associate Press article titled, Federal immigration failures fuel state action.

Mark Krikorian is the expert quoted. He is from the "Pat Buchanan" school of mainstreamed white supremacist political lobbying. His employer, the "Center For Immigration Studies", is an alleged think tank that used to be the research arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

Even though it has been spun-off and allegedly separated from the more radical FAIR, the Southern Poverty Law Center still considers the Center For Immigration Studies part of the list of anti-immigrant hate groups created by John Tanton.

MMMM! DO YOU SMELL WHAT NEZUA'S COOKIN'? It's the flava of the voting week, and that flava is currently simmering and spiceh!!! It may fade in a few, but for now, that flavor is Obama and McCain's Concern for Latin@ Issues. It also means that the "Left Blogosphere" or the "Liberal Blogosphere" is alight with talk of Immigration! Of course too much of this talk is related to electoral possibilities bereft of a moral context, and on the part of the candidates is frankly quite vague or rearrangeable from moment to moment.

WASHINGTON -- In a new ad targeted at the battleground states of the West, John McCain presents himself as a champion of Latino immigrants, making particular effort to highlight his differences with other members of his party on the issue.

It is a message that threatens to disrupt the delicate balance McCain had sought on the issue by simultaneously defending of the contributions of illegal immigrants to American life while demanding secure borders to prevent the arrival of new ones.

"So let's from time to time remember that these are God's children. They must come into the country legally, but they have enriched our culture and our nation as every generation of immigrants before them," McCain says in a clip from a Republican-primary debate in June 2007 in which he celebrated the sacrifice of Latinos, including those not yet citizens, to the US military.

—McCain goes west with pro-immigration ad

It's rather moving, eh? Especially given how lately he has been pushing the security-laser-fence-raid-detainment-punishment aspect of the issue. But you know. "Maverix" are people who say, quite honestly and from the belly, whatever they think will increase their popularity.

And we know Obama cares, right?

The American people are a welcoming and generous people. But those who enter our country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law. And because we live in an age where terrorists are challenging our borders, we simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked. Americans are right to demand better border security and better enforcement of the immigration laws.

—Floor Statement of Senator Barack Obama on Immigration Reform

Oh wait, wrong quote! Sorry. Here we go.

The time to fix our broken immigration system is now. It is critical that as we embark on this enormous venture to update our immigration system, it is fully reflective of the powerful tradition of immigration in this country and fully reflective of our values and ideals.”

—[Obama Statement in U.S. Senate, 5/23/07] (PDF)

Good.

This is why The Sanctuary has created a survey of very specific questions through which the candidates (and we don't mean just Democrats and Republicans) can flesh out just what these very noble phrases mean in the context of some issues that are pressing, not only to Latin@s, but to those concerned with Human Rights.

I would have subtitled this video "America's New Civil War".

From the production company :
The New York Times and the Washington Post have recently reported on the "System of Neglect," namely, the state of immigration detention center conditions. As told by her sister June Everett, watch the story of Sandra Kenley, a 52- year-old grandmother, who after living in the U.S. legally for 33 years, was subjected to these very conditions and died in immigration detention.

THE UNAPOLOGETIC MEXICAN blog was linked and mentioned yesterday in a Chicago Tribune article. I felt the need to respond to the article.

Excerpt:

What kind of American is this who wants to ride the pile and let others suffocate beneath?

What kind of Americans are these that bubble over with corny conforming and empty joy as they hang cheap Walmart flags thinking it marks them as patriotic—all while they spread Fear of Other sentiment, and lies that divide the different peoples in our nation? In what kind of united state do they exist?

—Humanists VS Nativists

Read the full blog here. And as always, I encourage all those dedicated to Human Rights for All to sign up and join our effort while you are there.

Crossposted to The Unapologetic Mexican.

Picture from the Boston Herald.

What a sad day.Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who was elected with a wave of hope, has turned his back on migrants.

Governor Deval Patrick has decided against taking action to allow illegal immigrants to pay resident tuition and fees at state colleges and universities this fall, an administration official said yesterday, crushing advocates who were counting on the governor to deliver on a pledge to support the students.

Maria Sacchetti - Boston Globe (22 May 2008)

This is a sad day for hundreds of migrant youth, whose only hope to go to college this year was crushed.What makes this an even harder pill to swallow is that Patrick is turning his back on a promise he made during his campaign.

We will have in-state tuition for undocumented aliens when I am governor.

Deval Patrick - WBZTV (4 April 2006)

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.

[Crossposted from Latino Político]

It's time to take another look at what's shaking across the pro-migrant web.

The crew over at Long Island Wins covers the local neighborhood/workplace raids that saw over 2,000 people being rounded up and imprisoned.

Speaking of migrant prisons, the T. Don Hutto Blog alerts us to a sexual assault that lead to no prosecution of the offending officer. XicanoPwr expands at ¡Para Justicia y Libertad! with The Politics of Humanity: Deporting Victims of Sexual Abuse. yave begnet alerts us to a story where the sister of a U.S. citizen who was imprisoned for not being able to produce citizenship documents speaks out. Vox ex Machina writes of Flor Cristosoma, the latest migrant mother to seek sanctuary in her church.

Over at the Drum Major Institute Blog, Suman Raghunathan offers a post explaining the deadly consequences of a population that remains silent on human rights abuses within the broken immigration system. Specifically, the case of Edgar Castorena - a 2 month old Oklahoman that died after his parents were too afraid to seek medical care for fear of deportation.

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.

ACCESS WASHINGTON: TRACKING THE ANTI-IMMIGRANT MOVEMENT
FROM GRASSROOTS TO ONLINE

WHAT: New America Media conference call with Washington experts to track immigration legislation. This week’s call will look at how anti-immigrant movement has been organizing online as well as the grassroots and how they have been accessing media. From national organizations like FAIR to blogsphere how effective has the anti-immigrant been using new media and getting their message across? What are they doing to put immigration in the hot seat ahead of the caucuses in Iowa? Which are the best-known blogs? Are immigrant rights organizations able to fight back? Who's who in the anti-immigrant movement?

WHO: Participants will include

Henry Fernandez, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center
Liza Sabater, Blogpreneur, CultureKitchen and The DailyGotham
Devin Burghart, Director of Building Democracy, Center for New Community

WHEN: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 10:30 AM PST (1:30PM EST)

RSVP: All ethnic media are invited to participate in the call though space on the call is limited. The call-in number is 1- (866) 244-4629 . The conference ID is 1180231 . For any questions or further information please contact Sandip Roy at sroy@newamericamedia.org or 415-503-4170.

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: NAM offers this service to ethnic media across the country. The fee to subscribe is your agreement to send us clippings or links to any articles you produce based on the call. Your stories help NAM sustain the program through foundation support. Please send clippings or links to Sandip Roy at sroy@newamericamedia.org or 415-503-4170.

Originally posted on Citizen Orange.

I admire people that work to build unity where there is division.  Building unity leads humanity in the direction of ideals.  Building consensus is admirable, but compromising with hate is not.

In her Washington Post op-ed, "The Right Road to America?", Yale Law Professor Amy Chua compromises with hate.  In an attempt to forge a middle ground between tolerance and toughness, she makes deals with the devil.  The net result is an argument that rests on nativism. 

Chua makes the fallacious argument that, within nations, "pluralism and diversity" leads to "violence and instability".  Reading her op-ed, I couldn't help but be reminded of the lunatic mission statement of Frosty Wooldridge's website (Another front for NumbersUSA):

Our English language is under assault and our schools
are drowning in ethnic violence, rapes, drugs and gang warfare. In
California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, our hospitals suffer bankruptcies
from non-paid services for 350,000 annual 'anchor babies'. Ten million
illegal immigrants displace jobs from America's working poor and depress
wages for many others. Leprosy, tuberculosis, Chagas Disease, hepatitis
and other diseases 'pour' into our country within the bodies of illegal
immigrants who avoid health screening before coming on board the United
States. Even worse, clashing cultures with religions that celebrate
'female genital mutilation' and subjugation of women are growing in
enclaves around our country. As Lincoln said, "A house divided against
itself can not stand." [...]

Our leaders are outsourcing and offshoring our
jobs to Third World countries while they import the Third World into our
country. America's middle class is being driven into the unemployment
lines. Our schools are becoming dysfunctional towers of Babel with over
140 languages. We can not stay afloat with this kind of linguistic chaos.
Yes, we have compassion for immigrants, but it's our country and our
children. Their leaders need to take care of them in their countries.
Unfortunately, Congress and leadership of this nation refuse to step
below the water line to see how fast we are sinking. We're $6.8 trillion
in debt. There were 20 different languages on the California recall
ballot. Whose country is this anyway?

- Frosty Wooldridge

Chua is certainly more logical and less extreme in her nativism than Wooldridge is.  But the premise of their arguments is the same.  Migrants subvert the U.S.'s national identity.

An Appeal to the Migratory

"Racism", "Pluralism", and "National Identity", are all very complicated terms that Chua plays with in her op-ed.  It would take a pages to define each of them and their interactions with migrants, and a whole books to discuss how they're interrelated.  What's worse, I've added another term to the mix: "Nativism".   Chua is smart.  She is not a political scientist or a philosopher.  Rather than weave her own argument, she draws on the work of Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, and his book, Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity.  I'm not going to delve into a critique of Huntington's book in this post.  Alan Wolfe does a good job in Foreign Affairs for those that are interested.

Either way, the most important thing to remember about all of these terms, is that they have systemic connotations.  That means that it doesn't matter what you're background, views, or actions are as an individual, it says nothing about your systemic views.  People of color can be racist.  Women can be sexist.  Migrants can be nativist.  The cracks in Chua's epistemology start to show when she uses her individual experience to make systemic arguments.   Readers should raise their eyebrows when she uses her parents to justify her support for Huntington.

Are we, as the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warns,
in danger of losing our core values and devolving "into a loose
confederation of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with
little or nothing in common apart from their location in the territory
of what had been the United States of America"?

My parents arrived in the United States in 1961, so poor that they
couldn't afford heat their first winter. I grew up speaking only
Chinese at home (for every English word accidentally uttered, my sister
and I got one whack of the chopsticks). Today, my father is a professor
at Berkeley, and I'm a professor at Yale Law School. As the daughter of
immigrants, a grateful beneficiary of America's tolerance and
opportunity, I could not be more pro-immigrant.

Cross posted from DailyKos.

The U.S. has a long history of using its forces and laws to put down Labor. In the late 1800s Pinkerton agents, paid by the DOJ, became famous for infiltrating the Molly Maguires. In the early 1900s, state militias and local police were used to break strikes by breaking heads.

Today, the criminal immigrant isn't an Irish miner; it's a Mexican warehouse worker, meatpacker or hotel maid. And today's Pinkertons are ICE agents working outside their own rules and the rule of law to coddle exploiters and criminalize the exploited.

The latest incident is occurring in Long Island City, Queens, where the Teamsters of Local 805 are working to organize nearly 900 warehouse workers at a FreshDirect warehouse.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Fresh Direct to stop threatening its workers.

Farai Chideya must love my evil laughter because once again I join another episode of NPRs News and Notes' Blogger Roundtable. And grock knows it's going to be difficult not to laugh. One of the topics we may be discussing? Tom Tancredo.

Tom Tancreado refused to appear on Univisión's Foro Republicano because he's against the "balkanization" of the United States. You can find his intellectually weak rationalization on this TV news interview. While watching that piece of genius, I stumbled upon an actual interpretation of his annoucement put together by a group called "Team Tancredo" (which may or may not be affiliated to the candidate) :

I honestly can't believe these guys are serious. Do we need to remind Tom Tancredo, the son-of-immigrant Italians, and his team to never go there? Two can play that game. Worst part? The following is a "real life" clip :

Have you seen the Tom Tancredo ad about how Central American gangs are taking over the United States and he's the only one brave enough to stop them?

Here's the jewel in the son-of-Italian immigrants anti-immigrant crown :

The word "immigration" may have an official definition in dictionaries, yet as a meme it continues to be written and expanded to proportions that are truly mythical.

Tell me if the rabble of Tancredo's rouse is not reminiscent of JR Tolkien's army of Orcs?

Come to think of it, I can understand why the Elvish-looking Tancredo is worried.

Yet, let's look at this closely shall we. As a building block in the narrative of the "immigration" meme, what Tancredo and his team have concocted in that ad is rather impressive.

[Crossposted from Latino Político]

Here's what's crisping on the comal from pro-migrant blogs across the web

The dim bulbs over at the Politico have decided to lay claim on the spanish language, threatening La Política with legal actions for copyright violations on the name of their site. I'm salivating at the thought of receiving a notice in my inbox. La Neta over at Adventures of the Coconut Caucus does some sleuthing and discovers at the Politico is not the first publication by that name.

The crew over at Amnesty International's Aliados blog are showing their solidarity with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers who recently marched against Burger King for refusing to pay their pickers and farmers just wages. They are also looking for artists to participate in the showcase titled, ¡Presente! Homenaje a la Mujer.

Brenda Norrell over at CENSORED sends out the alert for the cross cultural/bi-national event Día de los Reyes Magos on January 6th. She also reminds us that Blackwater is getting a bigger role in border security.

This is the last of the videos I shot at Elizabeth Upton's class at LaGuardia Community College. They are recent (and not so) immigrants who are in her English as a second language class (or the CUNY Language Immersion Program).

Here is part one of the series.

Then mozie on to part two.

Sultana asks the questions we all've been waiting for:

The students worked hard at coming up with questions. Sultana is actually asking the question for another student, Malva, who knocked it out of the part but was too shy to get on camera to speak her own words.

So, in the spirit of having them have a bit of a moment in participatory democracy, I asked them to get all together and around Sultana while she read the question off the whiteboard. And this was momentuous because even Sultana didn't want to participate earlier in the class. I think that seeing the others having fun and not being judged (by her teacher or me) for their performance must have given her courage.

Originally posted on Citizen Orange

Bob Dylan - The Times They Are A-Changin'

Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.
    - Lyrics

I never thought I'd see the day when I could safely say that the pollsters, the pundits, and the establishment democrat bloggers would turn toward the light migrant justice.  That day has come and it only affirms one of the Doctor Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s most hopeful themes.

The arc of the
moral universe is long but it bends toward justice
    - Doctor Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

After Republicans failed with their anti-migrant rhetoric in Virginia, the powers that be have begun to sing a different tune.  Duke at Migra Matters was the first to pick up on how the tone has changed.  This is a Washington Post article before the results were in:

Originally posted on
(Peter Pereira / New Bedford Standard-Times)

I can safely say that this is the saddest story I've had to tell of an individual suffering from U.S. immigration policy.

I've written story after story about the suffering of individuals. No matter how much suffering migrants go through U.S. citizens just seem not to care, in effect, if not intent. Anti-migrant advocates actively ridicule dead migrants, and most progressives do nothing about it.

The New Bedford Standard-Times (please counter the hate people are spewing on this article) just published a story on the death of Ricardo Gomez Garcia.  He left an autistic child and his wife behind after the horror of New Bedford.  After fighting for five months in detention to stay in the U.S. he was deported back to Guatemala, where he made the choice to try and re-enter the U.S. again.  He met up with his family after the harrowing journey that I know so well, and fell ill.  After just 24 hours with his family, he died.

Skip to the end for how you can help.

The first time I learned about Garcia was a through a National Public Radio report on his family.  The report inspired me to write a comprehensive post on the New Bedford Raid.  I'm going to transcribe the NPR report below but keep in mind this was filed long before Garcia died.  Claudio Sanchez reports:

Claudio Sanchez: A three story apartment building at the end of a
narrow steep spiral stairway, a middle-aged woman no taller than
4'10'', black hair pulled tight in a bun, answers the door of a small
apartment.  A little boy clings to the woman's dress, he groans. 

"He doesn't speak," she says, "but he was born in this country". As if
that somehow made up for her son's disability.  We sit at a tiny table
against the kitchen wall.  It's really dark.  She's $200 behind on the
electric bill so she's trying to use as little electricity as
possible...

Juana in Spanish: "The problem that I'm dealing with right now...I am traumatized by the sadness of my husband..."

Claudio Sanchez: Her little boy, though, isn't eating well.  Today,
he's upset about something.  He thinks his father is coming home any
day, now.

Juana in Spanish: "He looked for him and showed me his clothes.  He showed me his
clothes and then looked towards the window, because he always looked
that way when he was coming home from work.  Once he saw him he would
wait for him at the door."

Claudio Sanchez: He points to his father's clothes in the closet and
stands by the window every afternoon waiting for him to arrive from
work.

Everything about this story points to love.  A lawyer describes Garcia's determination:

[Ondine Galvez Sniffin] noted that Mr. Garcia had a different
attitude than many of the Bianco detainees who were tired and ready to
go back to their home country.

Bill Hing, Jennifer Chacón and Kevin Johnson do a bang up job at keeping us up-to-date with the latest on immigration law here in the United States. Definitely a must read.

I'm researching income patterns among minority groups here in the United States and I came across the following article. It has bits of information such as the fact that the US Latino consumer market is as big as the entire Mexico economy. Now, given that Mexico is the 4th largest country in the Americas, that's nothing to sneeze at.

I mean, if all latinos in the US could easily buy back Mexico, why would anybody be concerned about us as a burden to our economy?

Minority groups' share of $10 trillion U.S. consumer market is growing steadily, according to annual buying power study from Terry College's Selig Center for Economic Growth

The Selig Center's annual report includes state-by-state projections of buying power for the nation's three most populous racial groups (African American, Asian and American Indian), as well as Hispanics, who are categorized by the U.S. Census as an ethnic minority and not a racial minority. Buying power, also referred to as disposable income, is the total personal income available for spending on goods and services after taxes. The state-by-state projections are broken down by market size, growth rate and market share.

The steep curve of Hispanic buying power is largely the result of immigration and population growth, Humphreys said. The 2000 U.S. Census reported that about one person out of eight living in the United States was of Hispanic origin. By 2012, that population figure is projected to approach one out of every six.

Hispanic buying power has risen from $212 billion in 1990 (the beginning boundary of the Selig Center study) to $862 billion in 2007, representing growth of 307 percent over that time. By comparison, the combined buying power of all non-Hispanics in the United States grew 125 percent during the same period.

John Derbyshire, National Review Online's resident bigot, publishes a would be smear to latinos by calling Iowa Aztlan North because in the land of " Lundqvists and Muellers", there happens to be more than 50% that go by Perez or Rodriguez.

The bigotry is mind blowing :

Aztlan North [John Derbyshire]
Incidentally, while hobnobbing with those Midwesterners at Storm Lake, Iowa—their surnames mostly taken from the Stockholm, Oslo, and Berlin phone books—I heard a couple of times the remark that in this little corner of rural Iowa, the student body in the schools is half Hispanic. The remark was passed in a polite, diffident and non-condemnatory way—of course! this is Iowa—and when I tried to probe, people just retreated into niceness ("These Mexican restaurants are really great!")

Still, I found it hard to believe, surrounded as I was by Lundqvists and Muellers. In an idle moment, however, I looked up the stats on GreatSchools.net. Sure enough, the "Student Stats" on GreatSchools for Storm Lake show percentages Hispanic as:

High school: 32
Middle School: 43
Elementary schools: 53, 66, 63, 53.

Say what you like, that is truly an invasion. Why on earth are we letting this happen?

I just read this earlier this afternoon, sent it to my e-mail lists and ran out to pick up my kids from school. Justin Cole of Media Matters jumped on the email and had it put up on their site.

Photo courtesy of Univisión

I am so glad I didn't go to Miami for this :

Reporters who didn't speak Spanish were already anxious about the translation devices that didn't quite fit in our ears. (Porque soy de California, yo hablo un poquito Espanol.)

But 90 seconds before the forum began tonight, the Media Room had no sound - not in Spanish, English or French. Nada.

Spanish- and English-speaking reporters in the room erupted in a panic, sending University of Miami staff scrambling to try and fix the feed. What most reporters heard for the first 16 minutes of the debate was static - both from the closed television feed and from the translation device.

Even Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) seemed to have trouble, yanking the earpiece from his ear mid-way through his answer to a question on Iraq.

Notwithstanding the awe inspiring set and the hard hitting tonality of the questioning, I don't think that Univision did anything groundbreaking. On the contrary, by not allowing Dodd and Richardson to respond in Spanish, they pandered to the Democrats who still treat latinos as a political ghetto from where to get voting servants to work for their "mainstream" agendas.

Richardson complained, and with good reason, about not being able to speak in Spanish. Hillary, Obama, Edwards, they need to get over it. Spanish is the official second language of the United States, thanks in part to that little colony nobody ever mentions in these forums anyway, Puerto Rico. If they couldn't deal with it, then their muscling in the “English-only” requirement for the forum should be used against them at the voting booth.