Project Economic Refugee

This on the heels of Project Economic Refugee’s post on how ICE’s “Secure Communities Program” might be misrepresenting in Santa Barbara County CA, here comes a report from PBS on what is going on elsewhere:

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Far from the U.S.-Mexico border, local police arrest thousands of illegal immigrants. Congress wants to make sure these people are deported. To get the job done, it’s relying on a program called Secure Communities. But there’s a hitch: Despite its name, the program may actually hurt public safety.

[...]

Because of the program’s failure to focus on high-level offenders, critics say it’s causing fewer immigrants to share information with police that can help solve cases or prevent future crimes.

“This is creating a huge distrust, a huge void in our community-police relations,” said Cesar Espinosa, who works for the Central American Resource Center in Houston. Both the city and the county here are enrolled in Secure Communities. “We have a lot of folks who ask us, if I report a crime, will I be asked for my paperwork?”

Among those most in danger are undocumented women in abusive relationships. They fear being arrested if police respond to their domestic violence calls, and having to leave their children behind.

Read the rest of the report here.

So what do you think?  Is the “Secure Communities Program” actually making us unsafe?

Was this ICE program a misrepresentation of what it was initially billed as?  Via the Santa Ynez Valley Journal:

“(Secure Communities) is doing a better job of breaking up families than making the community safer,” said Bridget Kessler of the Immigration Justice Clinic, which helped obtain the data after filing a request under the Freedom of Information Act earlier this year.

Kessler said that the program co-opts local law enforcement into doing immigration enforcement, “thus destroying the relationships among police and the communities they serve.” In Santa Barbara County, the number of non-criminal illegal immigrants deported is above the national average; however, in Travis County, Texas, 82 percent of deportations were of non-criminals.

“This indicates that there may be an issue with racial profiling,” Kessler contended. “The local police may be targeting people on the basis of their race or appearance, and the person is being deported, regardless of whether there was a legal basis for the initial arrest.”

Read the rest of the report here.

Prominent progressives AND conservatives have called out Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law as un-American.  So why are we still afraid to name just how authoritarian and racist that law is by using the term “Nazi”?

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
-From Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

In the case of Arizona, perhaps the more appropriate question should be “would calling Arizona’s SB 1070 law by any other name other than “Nazi” make it any less racist or any less authoritarian?” 


It’s time to stop apologizing for calling out racism and for categorizing Arizona’s immigration law as what it truly is about.  Now that Judge Susan Bolton (a conservative judge that was recommended to the bench by Republican Senator Jon Kyl) has struck down major portions of Arizona’s authoritarian police law, new major dynamics have consolidated for both opponents and supporters of Arizona’s runaway law.  On the one hand, opponents of the immigration law have been validated: by the blocking of major provisions of SB 1070, other states have been put on notice; also, opponents of the immigration law have been proven right in the arguments that classify Arizona’s dacronian law as an alarming threat to American liberty itself.  On other side of the debate, by fighting Judge Bolton’s decision, Governor Brewer and her camp are looking more and more like nothing else but right-wing authoritarians that have embraced ideals that are in direct opposition to American values.  Bottom line is that by continuing to peddle such immigration laws, right-wing Arizonan politicians are forcing honest well-intentioned police officers to act as some sort of gestapo agents. 

Before you start to argue otherwise, let’s take a hard look at why it has been hard not to make the gestapo comparisons.  When you hear about the horrible acts that are being committed in the name of “immigration enforcement”, it is hard to not compare what Arizona is doing to Nazi and/or white supremacist ideology.  When you hear about how actual neo-Nazis are literally out hunting down immigrants, it’s hard not to call it “Nazi”.  When you hear about how white supremacist nationalists are behind the legal defense fund in support of SB 1070, it’s hard not to call it “Nazi.”  When you see cases where racial profiling has led to such barbaric acts such as the time when a pregnant woman was forced to give birth cuffed by the wrists and ankles, it’s hard not to use the word “Nazi” … and again, when you find out that SB 1070 was written by and introduced to the Arizona legislature by people that are proud to identify themselves as “Nazis”, it’s hard not to use the word “Nazi”.  Equally unsettling, it’s been at times difficult to understand just how some have argued otherwise.  Perfect example was the furor that was spread in local Southern Californian media outlets when Congresswoman Linda Sanchez pointed out something that is very much the case: how some of the people behind the Arizona law actually ARE white supremacists.  After her comments, it was astounding to see how the right-wing talking points started to shape media coverage of the chain of events: implying that she was a racist for merely calling out and standing up to the true racists!  What an upside-down world we live in, truly.       

Speaking of mainstream media coverage, there was one particularly reporter that went out of his way to promote the argument that using Nazi comparisons in describing Arizona’s SB 1070 was completely inappropriate.  Last May, Robert Jablon of AP interviewed a prominent rabbi, implying that the Nazi comparisons were going too far because they diminished the Holocaust, stating that:

Arizona’s tough new law against illegal immigration has prompted furious protests and boycotts but Jewish groups say opponents who compare it with the rise of Nazi Germany are going too far.

“It diminishes the Holocaust,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center, an internationally known Holocaust studies center based in Los Angeles.

“Survivors and others are very upset about this,” he said Friday. “When you exaggerate, it’s very harmful to them when they know that their mothers and fathers were taken to the gas chambers without any recourse to the law. They lost children.”

First off, I completely agree that comparisons between the Holocaust and Arizona’s immigration law would be completely inappropriate.  However, I highly doubt that most people are actually comparing Arizona’s law to the actual Holocaust.  What most people are doing, is comparing Arizona’s law to the threat of racist authoritarian supremacist acts.  It also begs this question: if it talks like a Nazi, acts like a Nazi, and in fact calls itself “Nazi”, are we then safe to assume that it IS “Nazi”?  Reporter Jablon, to his credit, did mention that Rabbi Hier’s homebase, The Wiesenthal Center itself, has actually come out in opposition to Arizona’s immigration law.  Nevertheless, it seems that the reporter went one step further to try to paint the picture as if there was widespread consensus on this matter on the part of Jewish groups; quote:

The national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham H. Foxman, wrote earlier this month that comparisons between Arizona’s laws and Nazism “delegitimize and trivialize the deaths of 6 million Jews and millions of others and soldiers who fought to defeat Nazism. They also play into the hands of those who support the Arizona law.”

He noted that some opponents of President Barack Obama’s policies have compared him to Adolph Hitler.

“It seems to happen with greater regularity in American political debate today than ever before: When anger reaches a fever pitch on a particular issue, out come the inevitable comparisons to the Holocaust,” Foxman said in an article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It has become a rule of thumb, an all-too-convenient catchphrase of the times.”

What the reporter failed to mention was that The Anti-Defamation League itself has also come out in staunch opposition to Arizona’s immigration law, going as far as filing an actual legal challenge to it.  Lastly, in the reporter’s AP note there was absolutely no mention whatsoever of how, again, the law was written and introduced by people that are proud to consider themselves supporters of actual neo-Nazis.

To downplay what Arizona’s law truly is about is just as dangerous as to overplay it.  All in all, I’m reminded of the words of Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel: “No Human Being is illegal”.  So what’s in a name?  Do you think the Nazi comparisons are spot on?  Or do you think otherwise?

[Video] She just made some comments against Arizona’s authoritarian police law at one of her concerts:

This is of particular significance because Lady Gaga is more known for her support of gay rights.  While the LGBTQ community as a whole tends to be supportive of other groups’ civil rights struggles, sometimes it is not always the case on the individual level.  Mutual education on tolerance needs to be accentuated with both sets of immigrant rights supporters and LGBTQ rights supporters.  For this reason, it is always positive to see the cross-pollination of progressive support among both sets of activist groups when it takes place on such a public scale.

Missed the speech? Watch the whole speech online on CSPAN’s website here.

Click on the picture to access CSPAN's full video of the President's July 1st, 2010 speech on immigration.

Here’s President Obama’s entire transcript of what he said during his speech.


Positive: the President mentioned the DREAM Act.  Called out the mistaken notion that taking on immigration reform is “bad politics”.  Pointed out what few dare to admit with the passing of immigration laws similar to Arizona: how they actually increase crime because they plant fear in immigrants and deter them from trusting police to report crimes.  Recognized the nature of the humanitarian crisis going on in our borders: having thousands upon thousands of human beings risk their lives, with many dying in their treks in the quest to escape oppressive poverty for themselves and their families.

Negative: on parts of the speech the President relied too much on conservative buzz phrases, which tends to constrict the immigration debate to issues of legalese rather than on fighting the extreme poverty that drives people to flee their countries in the first place to take refuge in the U.S. economy, in other words: the root of “illegal immigration”.

Evocative: the choice of location was designed to evoke the memory of Senator Ted Kennedy, who was an icon for Latinos and other immigrants in the advancement of their civil rights. 

Follow up questions: what was the purpose of the speech? It was powerful, as President Obama’s speeches usually are.  There was no mention of a specific timeline for next steps, no mention of what are the actual next steps, no actual commitment to pass a specific part of immigration reform (like the DREAM Act, for example).  Was the speech intended to be more of a campaign promise for the Latino vote going into the upcoming difficult midterm elections?

Update: Reform Immigration for America has a great tool to send a message to Republicans to stop standing in the way of immigration reform.  Click here to send a fax to them. Putting pressure on the Republicans is a good starting point but Democrats and the President himself need to be held accountable as well.  Besides federal action against Arizona’s new authoritarian police law, we need a down payment on immigration reform this year.  Enough stalling; a DREAM Act and an AgJobs Bill would be two good down payments, starting with the DREAM Act.  America’s Voice Online has this great tool to tell the President and Congress to move the DREAM Act forward.  Here’s the petition too.

It is heart breaking enough to observe how British Petroleum’s negligence (and arguably Halliburton’s by extension) has resulted in the wasteful destruction of vast natural resources and on the death of countless innocent animals but as if that were not enough now we get word that the cleanup workers are getting sick due to lack of proper protective equipment.  Even more outrageous: there are now reports that BP threatens to fire its cleanup workers if they bring their own protective equipment.  Keith Olbermann recently featured Marylee Orr of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and discussed the atrocious working conditions that are causing cleanup workers to get sick:  

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As the gulf’s local ocean-dependent economic activities lie in shambles, it is not surprising to see people in the area impacted by the oil disaster risk their own health in desperate attempts to feed their families and help alleviate the disastrous situation.  There is no question that the unprecedented nature of BP’s oil catastrophe on America’s coastline has forced everyone to improvise quick responses.  Edward James Olmos was recently interviewed by Anderson Cooper and had this to say (to access video of his interview, click here):

[...] no one knows why things are happening the way they are here; I have friends and relatives who want to volunteer their boats, to come down here and help, save their backyard [...]

People are anxious to help, in fact, perhaps the diversity in cleanup workers should come as no surprise in the cause to clean up America’s waters. Last June 2nd, El Diario La Prensa reported (translation via New America Media):

NEW ORLEANS — As oil escapes from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico and washes up on the coasts of Louisiana, hundreds of Latinos are working hard on the clean-up efforts.

Among them are 40 women. They are part of a group of 500 people who are preparing the dam near Hopedale, two hours from New Orleans, for the arrival of the oil slick. These 40 workers are employees of the subcontractor Tamara’s Group, which was contracted by the company Oil Mop.

..and what are the thank you’s that they are getting for risking their health?

Exhibit A.  AlterNet post: [Conservative] Cato Scholar Jokes About Using Undocumented Immigrants to Soak Up BP’s Oil.

Exhibit B.  Mother Jones’ report: ICE Running Immigration Raids on Oil-Spill Workers.

The gulf needs all the help that it can get, but it seems that the usual corporate exploitation of workers is unsurprisingly taking precedence over good will.  We need solutions to this disaster and we need them fast.  In fact, In light of all this urgency, the cleanup activities have been downright chaotic (as reported by The New York Times), to say the least.  Rachel Maddow on her blog highlights the conditions in which community members are forced to take actions into their own hands:

The local communities and shore areas most directly affected by the oil have been left, essentially, to fend for themselves. It’s a disgrace, it’s been a disgrace for weeks, and it needs to be fixed. 

Many commentators on the media argue that there are no true experts on how to deal with an oil explosion of this magnitude and so that makes the President’s job all the harder.  That may be partly true, but it ignores one key point that is not getting much play in the news: the expertise that does exist, is, in fact, not being tapped into.  Yes, that may be hard to believe, but it is something that is well-known among in the environmental circles and that the White House for some reason seems to be oblivious to.  Perhaps James Carville expressed best the urgent need for Obama to put an expert in charge.  Prior to Obama’s more public engagement in the crisis, Carville said the following during an interview with Good Morning America (Via the raw story):  

[...] The political stupidity of this is just unbelievable…

[...] Here you have a situation where you have eleven hard-working people blown off [an oil rig in the gulf] as a result of corporate malfeasance and maybe criminal negligence as a result of inept bureaucrats who were part of the — you can actually blame the previous Administration for this [...]

[...] These people are crying, they’re begging for something down here and he just looks like he’s not involved in this. Man, you got to get down here and take control of this, put somebody in charge of this thing and get this thing moving. We’re about to die down here.

Let me be frank: I am not a fan of Carville.  His connections with the conservative arm of the Democratic Party, the DLC, have always irked me.  However, I think James Carville made great points during his interview.  He was absolutely right in saying that there needs to be a person put in charge by Obama.  The person in charge should be someone that actually has expertise, unlike the mish-mash of bureacrats that have been handling the situation up to this point.  In fact, word on the environmental circles is that the White House has virtually shut the Environmental Protection Agency out of the cleanup decision making process.  In case you didn’t know, the EPA is the one agency in the nation that has the most expertise on oil spills and pollution response.  Yet, the White House for some reason seems to be tying their hands!  The current Administrator of the EPA, Lisa Jackson, would make an excellent choice to lead the cleanup efforts.  Mark Gold, President of the Southern California-based environmental organization Heal the Bay had the following to say on Huffington Post:

Change the face of the federal response. Lisa Jackson is telegenic, bright, articulate, a Princeton graduate in chemical engineering, a specialist in toxics, and a Louisiana native! What more can you possibly ask for? Oh yeah. She runs the agency with the most oil spill and pollution response expertise: the EPA. A Hollywood casting call wouldn’t give you a better candidate to lead the cleanup effort. The buddy team for 2010 should be Lisa J. and Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen. The public doesn’t want to see anyone from the MMS. Jane Lubchenko and the NOAA folks are mainly needed to trot out the latest scientific findings. And the other secretaries and special assistants just aren’t as reassuring to the public as Jackson. Stick a Saints hat on her head, give her some real authority beyond regulating dispersants, and let her lead. She will not disappoint.

It’s time to get our act together.  Instead of raiding Latinos and other immigrants, we need to ensure that all workers and volunteers are protected.  We need to make sure the cleanup efforts have the proper expertise and leadership behind them.  We need to get our priorities straight.  We need to protect America from the oil industry’s poisonous greed.

While the violence and harassement on the border seems to be on the rise against immigrant economic refugees, the right-wing continues to deny that violence is on the rise against these immigrants, while at the same time typically claiming that border cities are riddled with crime; and of course they blame the immigrants for this. In light of the Obama’s recent decision to appease the conservatives and militarize the border by sending 1,200 National Guard troops there, Sam Seder discusses how a recent report showed that the cities with the lowest crime rates in the country have actually been, gasp, along the border!

Mexico’s President visited The White House & Congress in the aftermath of Arizona’s new authoritarian and racist immigration law.

President Calderón made headlines this week, more than anything for his address to a joint session of U.S. Congress where he asked for the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban and for the rejection of Arizona’s new authoritarian police law.  Watch his full address by clicking here.


Full disclosure: for those that don’t know, Calderón is actually a social and fiscal conservative, whose Presidency is still tainted by allegations of election fraud, which prevented progressive presidential candidate Lopez Obrador (click here for Obrador’s website) from becoming President instead of Calderón.  Current Mexican President Calderón is also a big supporter of Mexico’s oil privatization to open it up to even more agressive foreign controls, something that would please U.S.-based corporations very much.  Having said that, you would think that conservatives would love Calderón.  Instead, he has been lambasted by the U.S. right-wing media for urging Congress to pass immigration reform, God forbid!

I can’t tell you how many times the tired old argument surfaces with conservatives again and again: that Mexico’s own immigration laws are just as authoritarian as the United States’ and so that somehow justifies draconian immigration laws.  First, I’ll repeat here what I have already stated on Project Economic Refugee’s site previously:

…two wrongs do not make a right.  For the sake of argument: just because Mexico or any other country might have been guilty of having an inhumane immigration policy of its own in the past, it does not mean that it is okay for the U.S. to have an even more horrible one.  The U.S. is supposed to be better, not worse, than other countries.

So what are the facts on Mexico’s own immigration laws?  Via ThinkProgress:

In 2008, the Mexican Congress voted unanimously with 393 votes to decriminalize undocumented immigration to Mexico. Undocumented immigration is now a minor offense punishable by fines equivalent to about $475 to $2,400. However, just because Mexico reformed its laws doesn’t mean its law enforcement authorities got the memo. Amnesty International recently issued a report saying there is still “widespread abuse of migrants in Mexico,” largely because Article 67 of Mexico’s immigration law still requires law enforcement to demand that foreigners prove their legal presence in the country — which is nearly identical to provisions in Arizona’s immigration law. The Interior Department is reportedly working to repeal Article 67 “so that no one can deny or restrict foreigners’ access to justice and human rights, whatever their migratory status.” However, rather than seeing it as a source of hypocrisy, the U.S. would be wise to examine Mexico’s experience with illegal immigration as an extreme, but poignant case study of the deputization of immigration law and what can happen when it turns immigrants into criminals.

I am clearly not here to defend Calderón nor Mexico’s politicians for their shortcomings to their own people but before you start believing the right-wing propaganda machine’s demonizing of  the solutions he proposed during his address to Congress, maybe you should take a closer look at what he actually said (something that the corporate media tends to gloss over).  Let’s review the transcrip from the Mexican President’s address to Congress to examine what he actually advocated for:

A stronger Mexico means a stronger United States … and a stronger United States means a stronger Mexico … Let us create more jobs for American workers and more jobs for Mexican workers; members of the Congress, I’m not a President who likes to see Mexicans leave our country searching for opportunities abroad; in migration our communities lose their best people, the hardest working, the most dynamic, the leaders of their communities, as migrants, as parents, [sometimes] will never see their children again.

…today, we are doing the best that we can do in order to reduce migration to create opportunities and to create jobs for Mexicans in our own country where their homes are and where their families are; as many jobs as we can, and Mexico will one day be a country in which our people will find the opportunities that today they look for outside of the country.  Until then, Mexico is determined to assume its responsibility.  For us, migration, is not just your problem, we see it as our problem as well.  My government does not favor the breaking of the rules, I fully respect the right of any country to enact and enforce its own laws but what we need today is to fix our broken and inefficient system; we favor the establishment of laws that work and work well for us all, so the time has come for the United States and Mexico to work together in this issue, the time has come to reduce the causes of migration and to turn this phenonemon into a legal order and secure flow of workers and visitors.  We want to provide the Mexican people with the opportunities they are looking for, that is our goal, that is our mission as government to transform Mexico into a land of opportunities to provide to our people with jobs and opportunities to live in peace and to be happy.

I don’t know about you, but that didn’t sound as crazy to me as the right-wing propaganda machine is making it out to be.

She’s claimed that she is against and offended by sexism (she did this specially during her tiff with David Letterman) but yet she remained utterly and suspiciously silent as the right-wing ravaged Sonia Sotomayor with sexist and racist attacks during her confirmation process as a Supreme Court Justice (click here to read the back story on that) at a time when even other Republicans were speaking out against such utter racism. People wondered “why?” Why remain silent when it would be a good political opportunity for her to speak out?  She could’ve easily capitalized on Newt Gingrinch’s stumble on some racist comments against Sotomayor and on the Spanish language itself (wished I were making this stuff up but it really happened) that he had made around that same time; she could’ve grabbed the opportunity to reach out to the Latino vote and upstaged one of her main Republican rivals (that is, if her intentions were still to eventually run for President) … but she didn’t. People again wondered “why?” 

She falsely accused President Obama of pal’ing around with terrorists during the election, when in fact she herself has been pal’ing around with racist extremists in the Tea Party crowd by attending their rallies and catering to their hatred.  In fact, she has been notorious for also remaining silent when Tea Party people attend her rallies and shout racist epithets at Obama calling him the “N” word and worse (I got alerted to this back in 2009 via a comment someone left here).

Now, her recent comments on Fox News justifying Arizona’s new immigration police law have revealed a sliver of what her attitudes are towards immigrants and especially towards Latinos and other minorities.  Watch:

Via Media Matters:

Palin: “There is no ability or opportunity in there for the racial profiling.” Appearing on the April 27 edition of Hannity, Fox News contributor Sarah Palin stated that “[t]here is no ability or opportunity in there for the racial profiling. And shame on the lame stream media again for turning this into something that it is not.” Palin added, “I think it’s shameful, too, that the Obama administration has allowed, too, this to become more of a racial issue by perpetuating this myth that racial profiling is a part of this law.”

Is there a pattern emerging here? Is there a racial undertone that Sarah Palin is starting to reveal in her actions? Why is Sarah Palin supporting a law that was written by white supremacists and then accusing others of racism? I’m not using hyperbole here, it was actually written by people that are well-known to have ties to actual Nazis.  Furthermore, she claims to be against so-called “big government”, which Arizona’s new immigration law clearly is: BIG government forcing honest, hard-working police officers to act as a kind of Nazi German Gestapo under the threat of being sued should they not act like it.   

For God’s sakes, even people that previously railed against so-called “big government” and even threatened to secede from the union at Tea Party rallies like Texa’s Governor Rick Perry have now come out against what Arizona has done.  Via Governor Perry’s website: 

“Recently, there has been much debate over immigration policy in Washington and what has been implemented in Arizona. I fully recognize and support a state’s right and obligation to protect its citizens, but I have concerns with portions of the law passed in Arizona and believe it would not be the right direction for Texas.

“For example, some aspects of the law turn law enforcement officers into immigration officials by requiring them to determine immigration status during any lawful contact with a suspected alien, taking them away from their existing law enforcement duties, which are critical to keeping citizens safe. Our focus must continue to be on the criminal elements involved with conducting criminal acts against Texans and their property.  I will continue to work with the legislative leadership to develop strategies that are appropriate for Texas.

A dangerous pattern is emerging on Sarah Palin: support for big government authoritarian laws written by Nazis, and absolute silence in the face of racist and sexist hate.  As a major public figure in the national scene, she bears responsibility, whether she likes it not, on all this, because after all, sometimes silence is tacit approval or in her case, a resounding endorsement.

 Arizona Republicans pulled a suicide pistol on their political careers by passing such racist unconstitutional and therefore anti-America law. These politicians and their allies in the Tea Party crowd are about to get a lesson on what a real rally looks like.   

So where is your city going to be meeting to rally against racist authoritarian police laws (like Arizona’s), and demand immigration reform?

In Downtown Los Angeles, there’ll be a big meeting point on the corner of Broadway and Olympic at 10:00am and will end with a rally at Broadway and Temple.

Here’s a map plotting planned marches (via reformimmigrationforamerica.org) across the United States; you can also see their running list here.

Here’s another working list (via immigrantsolidarity.org) of rallies and meetings points across the nation.

Articles:

Reuters: Arizona immigrant law energizes Hispanics, Democrats

New America Media: After Arizona, 100,000 Expected for LA’s May Day March

CNN: Group plans protests for immigrants’ rights in 39 cities Saturday