Posts tagged with 'Feministing'
Weekly Pulse: Senate Prepares to Cast First Votes
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
The Senate is scheduled to begin voting on proposed amendments to the health care reform bill today. It takes 60 votes to pass an amendment and most of the proposed measures for the health care bill will never pass. It’s a great opportunity to grandstand over pet issues, however. (more…)
Weekly Immigration Wire: It’s a Multicultural World, After All
by Nezua, TMC MediaWire Blogger
In the 1970s and 1980s, it was common to hear the phrase “melting pot.” Many people said our nation’s greatest strength could be found in its multitude of cultures, languages and histories. This sentiment has been lost, as right-wing pundits and politicians increasingly espouse a dread of anything different and a fear of the Other.
This retrogressive, inflexible mindset reduces complex arguments to one thing: Us vs. Them. But the world never has been that way, and approaching it as such could be disastrous. Everything is connected: Our food systems, economies, and cultures. Large corporations no longer belong to any one nation, but are global in scope. In an increasingly connected world, our immigration policy is impacts the health and well-being of many peoples and economies.
As covered in last week’s Wire, the U.S. and Cuba are resuming immigration talks that stalled in 2003. But, as AlterNet made clear, things aren’t too promising. Discussions will be constricted to immigration issues alone, according to at least one international policy expert. Wayne Smith, a Cuba expert at the Center for International Policy in Washington, says that holding these talks without broadening them to related issues is dishonest and should cease “until the Cuban people are able to exercise their fundamental human rights and civil liberties, and until the conditions in U.S. law are fully met.”
This is an interesting point, and could also be applied to U.S.-Mexico relations. For example, in 2008, the Mérida Initiative was signed into law under the Bush administration. The Mérida Initiative’s legislation enables the U.S. to aid Mexico’s Drug War. The aid includes training for police and military, equipment including surveillance technology, and intelligence assistance. But the militarized assault on Mexico’s thriving drug economy has claimed an unacceptable number of lives—over 12,000 since it began in December of 2006.
Is this much death and displacement acceptable, given the scope of this complex social issue? According to a recent mid-term vote in Mexico, no. The vote, which favored the opposition party, was largely seen as a rejection of the Mexican president’s violent model of engagement. The U.S. should take a stand against the many human rights abuses that our taxpayer dollars are essentially funding.
New America Media has video on the drug war’s impact on citizens, which contains footage of Mexican troops attempting to take their cities back “street by street.” Thousands of military troops now occupy their own country, patrolling the towns and highways, acting as police and creating an aura of fear and tension in a newly-instituted and potentially lethal “semi-war zone.”
Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a modern-day master of ignoring the larger picture. Currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for racial profiling and violating civil rights, Arpaio is currently crusading against Latino/as and immigrants. Feministing’s Ann Friedman writes that Arpaio “functions as a conduit for the worst impulses in our society.”
If Arpaio were to take a broader view of immigrants, even the undocumented, he might realize that his stunt-centric stances on immigration are harming everyone.
Food production is also closely related to U.S. immigration policy. RaceWire gets to the meat of the issue in Food Inc. Shines a Light on the Immigrant Labor That Makes That 99c Patty Melt Possible. Julianne Hing breaks it down:
“For people who can’t stand the presence of immigrants in their neighborhood, but spring for the $0.79 per pound holiday ham, news flash! A largely invisible workforce works for severely depressed wages to make that ham so cheap for you.”
In related news, the Colorado Independent features a new documentary on the Swift & Co. raids and “its effects on both the people involved and the larger local community” of Greeley, Colorado.
Former Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo is definitely in need of a more generous view on immigration, if not a wider lens through which to see it. Last weekend, Tancredo opined that young conservatives ought be invested in halting all immigration. A young audience member critiqued Tancredo’s viewpoint as “narrow-minded,” as “We’re really strapped [for] nurses, we don’t have enough teachers, we don’t have enough OB-GYNs.” Perhaps there is hope for the future of Conservativism after all!
Perhaps no one can be credited with promoting a wide-angle view of society more than Ronald Tanaki, who is often called the “father of multicultural studies.” New America Media commemorates Takaki’s life and work. From 1967 to 1987, Takaki’s contributions to the academic world and larger society were numerous. He taught the very first African American history course at UCLA and helped organize UCLA’S first Black Student Union, to start. Takiki studied, wrote, and taught about what he called “the hopeful ties that bind” us all together here in this nation. The comparative multicultural course he started at UCLA grew as he taught it over the years, eventually focusing on seven groups: Americans from China, Japan, Africa, Mexico and Ireland, as well as Native Americans and Jews from Russia. Takaki’s life and work made clear the always changing nature of our society, what role immigration has played in it, and that we still ought not fear these things.
A final positive note from the Iowa Independent: Officials from the Center for Disease Control and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are considering lifting a two-decade-old ban on HIV-positive immigrants. As Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine told MSNBC, this will end “the discriminatory practice for a disease that doesn’t warrant exclusion for coming into this country.” And it seems a healthy move. These people are carrying two potential stigmas upon entering the U.S. Let’s afford them a bit more opportunity, if we can. In the long run and in the bigger picture, helping those in need benefits us all.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: In Midst of Crisis, Signs of Reform
by Nezua, TMC Mediawire Blogger
President Obama has often stated that immigration reform cannot be approached in a piecemeal fashion, and that his administration would tackle the issue in 2009. This week, Obama will be meeting with members of Congress to kick off a bi-partisan approach to reform. These meetings don’t guarantee any legislative action will take place this year, but are at least an encouraging sign. In the meantime, the deportation industry shows no sign of slowing, hate crimes are rising and hate groups are being main streamed. As a result, the polarization between reform advocates and foes is getting worse.
New America Media’s Jun Wang writes about the disapointing consensus reached by a panel of immigration activists last Thursday at California State University in Los Angeles. A lack of movement around immigration reform won’t help curb rising rates of hate crimes against Latino/as, and compounds other instances of “othering” and racism. According to one panelist: “Employers in conservative cities” are learning that “they are better off not hiring people who are ‘foreign looking or having foreign sound names.’”
Not content with simply raiding homes, workplaces, or storming the local 7-11, Immigrations Customs and Enforcement (ICE) is escalating its enforcement tactics. Also in New America Media, Hiram Soto reports on the joint operation between the Border Patrol and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in deporting three high-school age girls, one as young as 16, who were stopped by ICE on their way to school. Immigration attorney Lilia Velasquez, who is representing the minors, said she “hasn’t seen anything like this in her 25-year career,” because the children are being let back into the U.S. to fight their deportation.
The plight of these girls is proof that the destructive deportation fetish sweeping the Department of Homeland Security is producing increasingly ridiculous results.
Pundits like Michael Savage are also feeding the violent and anti-immigrant, anti-Latino/a energy in the U.S. Samhita Mukhopadhyay at Feministing writes that these broadcasts are are created “for the purpose of inciting violence against immigrants and to fuel racial tension.” Exposing Savage’s “paranoid” and fearful obfuscation of reality, Mukhopadhyay clears up the anti-immigrant propaganda by pointing out that despite Savage’s tortured logic, the truth is that Immigrants are the “working base” of California, and not the ones creating a drain upon it. California’s immigrants pay roughly $40 billion in taxes every year.
One of the loudest politicians feeding anti-immigrant hostility is Tom Tancredo, a former Republican congressman from Colorado. The Colorado Independent has linked Tancredo to the Minuteman American Defense (MAD) and its former Executive Director Shawna Forde, accused of murdering Raul and Brisenia Flores, via a letter expressing the politician’s solidarity and gratitude to the organization for organizing a rally. It turns out that not only was this beaming “boilerplate rejection letter” (as campaign chair Bay Buchanan hopes to position it) sent to Forde, but a story published by the Everett Herald in 2007 places official Tancredo campaign staff at the event. The connections don’t end there and only grow more unsettling.
Those fighting for justice and on the side of human rights are hardly laying low in this time of legislative uncertainty. In a guest column for RaceWire, undocumented immigrant Sonia Guinansaca writes about how over 500 students from all over the U.S. attended a “Mock Graduation ceremony” on Capitol Hill last Tuesday. The ceremony was intended to both draw attention and show support for the DREAM Act. Guinansaca reminds us of our country’s most inspiring ideals: To be a nation where “nothin’ is impossible.”
RaceWire also brings us more news of youth behind change in Immigrants’ Kids File Lawsuit Against US, and Other News. In this political lull, “the kids of hundreds of deported parents are filing a lawsuit against the government claiming their constitutional right to stay in the U.S. is violated by the deportation of their parents.”
*Editor’s note: The original version of this post implied that all movement towards immigration reform had halted. We’ve updated this blog to reflect recent developments. Stay tuned to next week’s Wire for in-depth analysis of the push for effective immigration reform.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: Why Are Hate Crimes on the Rise?
by Nezua, TMC MediaWire Blogger
On May 30, 29-year-old Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter Brisenia Flores were shot to death, purportedly by a group of far-right anti-immigrant activists who broke into the Flores home by posing as police officers. On Friday, Shawna Forde, anti-immigrant activist and Executive Director of the Minutemen American Defense, (MAD) along with accomplices Jason Eugene Bush and Albert Robert Gaxiola were arrested on two counts of first-degree murder and burglary charges related to the Flores murders.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes that the MAD website denounces the murders, but wryly adds that the distancing is “a tad belied by headlines down the page,” like “Subhuman Mexicans (God’s Children?) Prey on Countrymen.” The Flores murders are part of a palpable political and social climate of hostility and revulsion toward Latin American immigrants that is running amok in our nation.
As Democracy Now reports, the FBI has noted a rise in hate crimes against Latinos, which isn’t difficult to verify anecdotally. And, according to Laura Flanders at GritTV, “economics, racial panic, immigration, [and] right wing rhetoric” all play a crucial role. If our government continues to spend resources that help portray people as both predatory and “subhuman,” it will continue to foster a perception that violence against this class can be committed in good conscience.
This national, anti-immigrant fervor has resulted in a courts system in which “countless immigrants are subjected to harassing or denigrating treatment” and “have no assistance in navigating the byzantine court process,” writes Mary Giovagnoli at AlterNet. She reports that “misguided deportation-only strategies have led to a breakdown in our immigration court system.” The system is overloaded, backlogged, and not operating effectively or humanely.
The U.S. immigration process is in disrepair due to neglect and improper stopgap measures (like agreement 287(g)), just as broken bones will fuse in any manner if not set correctly. We are mired in an interim period and tensions will continue rising until we take on the challenge as a nation. In any part of the process, from application to arrest to detention to deportation, there are glaring problems. RaceWire touches briefly on the lack of accountability in the detention system.
Is the increasing absorption of virulently racist mentalities into mainstream groups a terrible confluence of unrelated factors, or a predictable reaction to the “browning” of this country? At the same time the U.S. military has relaxed its rules on accepting recruits with ties to white supremacist movements, so have circumstances allowed for “a new crop of anti-immigrant groups to enter the mainstream dialogue, even though many have ties to hate groups with violent records,” as Miriam Zoila Pérez writes for Feministing.
The video above depicts Shawna Forde as a spokesman for one of these hate groups, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). FAIR made news on Tuesday for disingenuously presenting statistics that demonize immigrants as a strain to the economy. At AlterNet, Walter Ewing exposes the tortured logic FAIR employs and makes the case that “once … inconvenient truths are taken into account, FAIR’s ‘cost’ evaporates.”
It wasn’t long ago that we reported on how many anti-immigrant pundits were using the Swine Flu to create a toxic anti-immigrant/anti-Latino climate. And sadly, none of those people understand how hate speech leads directly to violence. Talking Points Memo makes the alleged murderers’ ties to the anti-immigration movement clear.
When the government build walls to stave off fears, it is, ironically, reinforcing that same emotion of fear. When hostile and punitive legislation is enacted, fear of the Other is mixed with aggression. When a fearful and aggressively rigid mindset is applied to social fluctuations that require flexibility and change, the result is an increase in the return of that negative energy.
And yet, hope will live on. And sometimes that hope will lead to historic change. Which is why we must keep writing and talking, keep pushing, and keep challenging all the injustice we find.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: Enforcement Creates Aura of Criminality
by Nezua, TMC MediaWire Blogger
The Latino/a community has had ample reason to hope that President Obama would take on immigration reform in a humane manner. While Obama is undeniably centrist in his political approach, and has long been fond of language stressing punitive solutions to the immigration issue, he certainly seems to understand that “America is changing and we can’t be threatened by it.” Enforcement policies are becoming a threat, not only to immigrants, but the country at large.
AlterNet picks up on a position paper authored by the Sanctuary’s founding editors (of which I am one) on the Luis Ramirez killing and subsequent court case. The article ties the crime and Shanendoah jury’s decision to a larger pattern of dehumanization aimed at Latinos/as, and analyzes “[h]ow effortlessly a subhuman category of being is constructed and subsequently reviled.”
It’s a disturbing lens for examining current immigration-related news, but useful. If a person is deemed criminal by nature of their appearance, name, and culture, then the larger public will feel comfortable treating them in ways they would never condone for themselves. This process unfolds when the nation is made fearful by hack punditry and politicians who continually employ aggressive verbiage and dishonest framing of the realities we face.
Nina Jacinto, writing for WireTap, thinks it crucial that communities of color “continue the conversation about Luis Ramirez, in order to find some kind of justice” in the situation. “[R]acial injustice may continue to exist subversively in many parts of the country,” Jacinto writes, “But in many areas, hate crimes against people of color go beyond language, can become violent, and end in death.”
Using a lens that positions immigrants as the Other and less-than, it’s easy to understand why some staunchly oppose the DREAM act, which grants temporary citizenship to people brought here as children, who have lived in the U.S. at least five years, received high school educations and are of “good moral character,” as Public News Service reports. Supporters of the DREAM act view its opposition as cruel; a punishment leveled on children who have done nothing wrong. But if one had no interest in seeing those children become an educated part of U.S. culture, opposing the DREAM ACT makes perfect sense.
It is hard to make sense, however, of continuing enforcement measures that clearly wreak havoc on a state’s economic well being. Arizona is harming its own economy via an extremely heavy-handed enforcement approach towards communities that keep the state healthy. Doug Ramsey interviewed Alessandra Soler-Meetze, director of ACLU-Arizona for Public News Service. She claims that “[w]e have relied on punitive measures that have targeted not just recent immigrants, but long-time legal residents and even U.S. citizens, simply because of the color of their skin.” This creates an aura of discrimination that bleeds consequences into surrounding communities.
This aura is visible in the comment threads of almost any immigration-related article online. Commenters show nothing but hostility towards mothers who are losing their children and jobs. They demonstrate absolutely no empathy. This atmosphere is cultivated by enforcement measures like those enacted in Arizona. As Leslie Savan writes in AlterNet, Mexicans have been “the prime target of the most rancid typecasting” in the discussion that plays out in the media. And “once the type has been cast, it has jumped easily to Latinos of any origins.”
A year has passed since the devastating Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Postville, Iowa. New America Media’s A Year Later Iowa Raid Haunts Immigrants covers how some workers were treated during the raids, and what their lives are like in the aftermath. Veronica Cumez, a “soft-spoken 33-year-old mother of three” was hit on the head by a ICE agent during the raid, then yanked from her hiding place. Now, as she awaits the final outcome of her case, she lives wearing an electronic ankle bracelet that reminds her of her status at every turn.
Besides anxiety, loneliness is also a major ingredient of her new life. In the weeks and months after the raid, an entire network of kin from her village in Guatemala, San José Calderas, including three brothers-in-law, were either arrested and deported or abandoned Postville.
In 2006, Barack Obama confessed a limit to his own mental prowess:
It’s hard to imagine that we want to live in a country where we would have police and immigration officials coming into people’s homes and taking away the father of a family, sending him back to Mexico, leaving a mother and child behind.
But this is where we live. And when the talk is constantly about how borders are unsafe, how Mexicans are bringing Swine Flu to our communities, or how immigrants are taking jobs away from U.S. citizens, of course events will play out violently.
In U.S. Women Migrants Protest Abuse in County Jails, Feministing’s Courtney Martin writes of how one woman’s arm was allegedly broken by Maricopa County Sheriff’s guards. And in a letter signed by many women (one who tells of her jaw being broken during an ICE raid) the situation is made starkly clear. “Please help us,” plead the women. “[W]e’re in a tunnel without end, treated like dogs.”
And yet, Democrats hem and haw, afraid to take a firm moral stance on what so many humans in the nation are living through. Less than a week after the annual May Day marches, and at the end of President Obama’s first 100 days, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano “carefully skirted repeated questions” about whether the forthcoming Immigration reform should include “broader opportunities for legalization of the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants living in the United States,” according to the Colorado Independent.
The administration views the immigration issue as “controversial and politically dicey.” It’s too bad that our representative are not comfortable coming out in strong support of human rights as they apply to all these situations.
There is a major problem with continuing a public dialogue stressing dangerous borders, plays tough with phrases like “going to the back of the line” and rounding up and deporting people. These “solutions” ignore one of the most important causes of the problems. There is an imbalance in the economic exhange between the U.S. and nations like Mexico.
Fortunately, there are those who fight such injustice. You will find these people at the very roots of the situation, such as students who start hunger strikes to protest the “violence and terrorism” aimed at the Latino/a community and hope to inspire “those in higher power to say that they can’t close their eyes to the injustices we see day after day.”
And as Yes! Magazine reports, May Day marches filled the streets of over 125 cities this year. Author Colette Cosner reminds us that the “hope of the May Day marches resides not in the media coverage nor the government’s lack of response, but rather in how it connected people in the community in their efforts for further actions.”
Finally, it is often mothers who fight the hardest against the injustices that affect their families. RaceWire’s Julianne Hing reports on Elvira Arellano, who was deported in 2007. Now in Mexico, Arellano is running for a seat in the Mexican Congress. “I am going to seek laws in Congress that protect women, and also that protect undocumented Central Americans who are treated like criminals in Mexico,” Arellano said.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Reconciliation and Discrimination on the Healthcare Front
Last Thursday, the House and Senate passed budgets for fiscal year 2010. The House version includes critical language that could open the door for healthcare reform in 2009–and not a moment too soon. Unemployment is skyrocketing, increasing numbers of Americans are going without health insurance, and Democrats are looking to pass a healthcare reform bill fast.
In the American Prospect, Ezra Klein explains three ways that budget reconciliation could be used to fast-track healthcare reform by bypassing a filibuster, allowing reform to pass with a simple majority vote. The three options are: regular reconciliation, delayed-onset, and do-over. Klein thinks there’s a real chance that the delayed-onset or do-over reconciliation options could work. Delayed-onset reconciliation would kick in only if the Democrats and the Republicans haven’t passed a healthcare bill by a certain date. Do-over reconciliation would be based on a gentleman’s agreement between the chairs of the House and the Senate budget committees to pass budget amendments if the two parties can’t agree on a healthcare reform package within a certain amount of time.
Evidence continues to mount that minorities are especially burdened by our dysfunctional healthcare system. Public News Service reports that lack of health insurance is becoming an epidemic in Michigan, that 28% of Ohioans under the age of 65 were uninsured between 2007 and 2008, and that minorities are still aren’t getting fair access in Massachusetts, despite attempts at reform. New America Media points to yet another alarming study from the University of Chicago on race and health disparities in Illinois:
In other news, personal responsibility takes a back seat to the war on drugs in Virginia. At Feministing.com, Miriam Perez discusses the case of a Virginia teenager who was suspended from school because she was seen taking her birth control pill during lunch hour. Never mind that her doctor had prescribed it and her mother already knew all about it.
It’s disappointing news on the 55th anniversary of the birth control pill. I guess they missed the memo about the benefits of preventative reproductive healthcare. If you need more proof that prevention pays, check out the latest study, covered in RH Reality Check by Emilie Ailts.
James Ridgeway of Mother Jones asks whether Obama’s FDA will be a watchdog or a lapdog when it comes to regulating Big Pharma. Under Bush the FDA became little more than a marketing arm of the drug and medical device industry. Ridgeway wonders whether the regulator agency will regain its authority and dignity in the new administration.
Finally, some news from the intersection of healthcare and human rights. Adam Serwer of TAPPED and Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly react to the news that doctors oversaw the torture of prisoners at CIA black sites. “Torture isn’t acceptable, no matter who’s inflicting the pain or coming up with legal rationalizations for it. But there’s something uniquely offensive about medical professionals who were directly involved with the torture of detainees at CIA secret prisons,” Benen writes.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. And for the best progressive reporting on the ECONOMY, and IMMIGRATION, check out, Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: Trapped Behind a Mesh of Broken Law
by Nezua
Media Consortium Blogger
As we are days away from ushering in a new president, hopes are high that relief can be had in federal immigration law. Yet, the Bush administration has made last minute changes to immigration law, reminding us once more of the incompetence in which we have been living for eight years.
New America Media’s highlights the gross willful negligence that is Bush’s trademark in Immigration Contradiction.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey determined that those [immigrants] tried in immigration courts had no right to challenge the outcome of their cases based on their lawyers’ performance. At the same time, the attorney general defended the policy of not guaranteeing legal representation to those appearing before immigration judges since these are civil cases and the Constitution does not consider this right under such circumstances.
In short, those detained for immigration violations are treated as criminal when it comes to invading their privacy by obtaining their genetic material. Yet, their cases are considered civil when arguing that they have no right to counsel.
When we answer genuine human need and national crisis with antics like this, we are in serious danger of losing our national soul. Or maybe just faith in our government. After all, as Feministing.com reports in Unions Win at North Carolina Plant, the workers seem to have retained both their souls and their faith, if only in each other:
When immigration agents raided Smithfield Food’s huge North Carolina slaughterhouse two years ago, union organizer Eduardo Peña compared the impact to a “nuclear bomb.” The day after, people were so scared that most of the plant’s 5,000 employees didn’t show up for work. The lines where they kill and cut apart 32,000 hogs every day were motionless. “Workers think it’s happening because people were getting organized,” said Vargas at the time.
If you do harbor hope that more people will wake up to the critical need for humane immigration reform, it can be daunting to read through too much of the mainstream reporting on the issue. Everyday, the undocumented are met with legal manipulation and sly criminalization. And many media outlets focus on punishment and sensationalize fear and danger. And of course, the ABC network is craven enough to make a reality show out of it.
New America Media reports on the new television show called “Homeland Security USA and the Facebook Group called “Take ‘Homeland Security USA’ reality show off the Air!” that rose up to protest the show. (Disclosure: I belong to this group.) And Raj Jayadev doesn’t mince words in Homeland Security Show Misses the Real Drama.
The program “Homeland Security USA” fails because it only shows part of the reality. Why not give a camera to a family crossing the border, to capture the horror of being chased down in the desert, surviving only through the desperation of an imagined American life? Or a workplace raid at a meatpacking plant in the Midwest, where workers flee agents who are armed like they are entering a war zone? Why not go to Eloy, Ariz., where sprung up out of the dirt in the middle of nowhere, like a mirage, is one the largest detention centers in the country –where detainees ask for deportation because the conditions are subhuman, and elderly men die of dehydration? [...]
While the program clearly shows the enormity and omnipresence of the mega-security agency, all this does is beg the more interesting question: How do ordinary civilians stay out of their clutches? How does an undocumented immigrant carve out an American life – work, go to school, build a family, plant roots – all while this multi-million dollar machinery called Homeland Security is stalking them every moment of the day? Drama is with the rebels, not the empire.
In Wiretap online magazine’s Advocating for an Identity, we get a closer look at one of these “rebels.” If you are imagining a wild-eyed Zapatista behind a bandanna, I’ll have to disappoint. For most of Stephanie’s 22 years, she had no idea that she fit into the often-despised category of “Illegal.”
Coming up on her eighteenth birthday, Stephanie pestered her mom to go with her to the DMV to finally get her California ID as an adult.
For the first 18 years of her life, Stephanie had no idea she was in the United States illegally, and she finally found out as she stood at the brink of adulthood.
In the same article, 25-yea-old Tam Tran pleads for the public to understand the importance of passing the DREAM Act:
“Without the DREAM Act, I have no prospect of overcoming my state of immigration limbo,” Tran said in her testimony. “I’ll forever be a perpetual foreigner in a country where I’ve always considered myself an American.”
She also talked about her experiences as an undocumented student a few months later in an October 2007 USA Today article. Later that month at work, Tran received a collect call from her mother.
Her family had been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
And that is the very fear that is haunting Yolanda Guevera, a United States citizen and member of the Army Reserve. You see, her husband is undocumented. In Deployed And Deported — Immigration law hurts military families, New America Media reports on Yolanda’s predicament.
Guevara is a rear detachment commander for her Army Reserve unit, which has already been deployed to Kuwait. It’s a matter of time before she would have to leave her husband and three children in North Carolina to join her unit. [...]
“He works part time but whenever I have to go out … he’s there for me,” Yolanda says. “I don’t think I could be in the military without him.” [...]
When Guevara explained her situation to the immigration officer, the response was less than helpful. “I told him, ‘My unit is going to be deployed, so I’m afraid— what if I’m gone and I’m stationed over in Iraq or Kuwait, and my husband’s [status] expires?’” she says. “What’s going to happen to my kids?”
She says the officer responded, “You worry about that when that happens.”
Without the dreams, hard work, risks, and ingenuity of immigrants, we would not be here. I know I would not. Nor would so many of our massive institutions of commerce, which began as nothing more than a humble and small business. It is as if we get comfortable and forget our own histories. The tales of struggle and dreaming and working and persecution—is this not America? Are these not our stories? Would we throw our own past into prison?
Let us hope for real change and more than that, let us keep working and fighting for it.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: 2009 is Make or Break Year for Immigration Reform
By Nezua
Media Consortium Mediawire Blogger
The new year rushes upon us with momentum born of crisis and necessity. In every direction one looks, change is needed—and not cosmetic alteration, but deep, structural repair. The issue of immigration is no exception.
As New America Media reports in Immigration Demands Heat Up Before Obama Takes Over, Latino/a communities are not alone in speaking out.”Lawmakers, academics, immigration advocates and newspaper editorials” are making noise and “demanding that early attention to be paid to the immigration issue.” The clamor is not just about ending politicization and criminalization of an issue. It’s a matter of who we are as a nation.
There should be a plan that would first allow most of the undocumented to become legal residents, the supporters said. The next step would be eligibility for a green card and ultimately citizenship, a process that could take between seven to 10 years.
Greater emphasis is on family re-unification and less on enforcement by the Department of Homeland Security that controls immigration, and an end to the unconscionable nighttime raids conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), arm of the Department of Homeland Security. [...]
Dr. Marco Mason, [a political science professor at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, and one of the most vocal immigration advocates in Brooklyn] couldn’t agree more. “President Obama would be telling the world that humanity has returned to U.S. immigration policies,” he said.
Poring over the Immigration Newsladder, one can make out the tensions at play as we, as a People, attempt to answer the question What kind of nation is the UNITED STATES? One approach to the immigration question is through punitive and aggressive means. On that end of the continuum are harsh laws, S.W.A.T.-style raids, mass jailings, a detention center industry, and inevitably, shattered families. The other side of the continuum offers a more humanitarian lens. This view recognizes the interconnected quality of all our struggles, hungers, and pains—and most importantly, that knows neglecting another is a detriment to the whole.
Public News Service reports on how we all benefit from understanding in New Medical Technology Helps CA Immigrants Bridge The Language Gap.
Rancho Los Amigos in Southern California is the first rehabilitation hospital in the world to implement a wireless Video Medical Interpreter system. VMI allows non-English-speaking patients to communicate with their doctors through an on-screen interpreter.
Roland Palencia, director of Community Benefit Programs with L.A. Care Health Plan, says the system improves communication, increases quality of care and reduces medical errors. [...]
“There is definitely a medical benefit to it, but also a psychological one: The patient really feels a lot more at ease that the provider actually understands what he or she is going through.”
Who doesn’t want that? Who ought to be denied such a thing? To some these answers are very clear cut, and even at a young age. Twenty-four year old Sophya Chum is one of those people. Sophya has been active in her community and working hard for change for almost half her life, and today is program coordinator for Khmer Girls in Action (KGA), “a Long Beach-based community organization for young Southeast Asian women,” as The Nation reports in Youth in Action: Sophya Chum, Immigrant Rights Activist. For Sophya, the fight is political and it is personal, and she has some very practical and uncluttered advice to those who want to do more to affect change in the world.
For people interested in advocating for the rights of immigrants and refugees, Sophya suggests starting simple. “Find a community [you're] interested in learning about and creating change in,” she says. “And begin to volunteer.”
Immigration is the quintessential American Story. And this story and its arc, ever repeating itself, is hardly limited to the Latino/a community or the Asian American community.
In Colorado playwright explores cultural conflicts of immigration, religion, the Colorado Independent tells the story of Don Fried, a respected author who began altering his book-in-progress when the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa was raided on May 12, 2008.
Fried is currently toying with the idea of having one of the play’s discontented locals, a character who has not been happy about Jewish people coming to town and building a kosher meatpacking plant there, tip off the federal authorities and spark the immigration raid.
“But then, as the town starts to crater, that person and all the others begin to wonder what has been done — they’ve killed the goose that laid the golden egg,” he said.
There’s that interconnectedness again, and this time through an economic lens.
And so these borders and boundaries, designed to separate us, also thread us together through our lived experiences interacting with them. The Latina/o community, the Jewish community, the Asian American community, the Irish community—and the Polish community, as New America Media reports in Polish Community Shocked by Treatment of Polish Citizens at U.S. Border.
This year ends with an unpleasant intervention by Poland’s diplomatic staff at the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw. At issue are recent cases of Poles who were denied entry to the U.S. at the New York area airports.
While no one questions the right of the U.S to bar certain individuals from entering the country, the treatment of Polish citizens was shocking to many, especially since most of those stopped at the border were older women in their 60s and 70s. Many of them were coming to visit their families and friends for Christmas, but instead ended up being interrogated by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and transported in handcuffs to a detention center.
And we have to ask ourselves again, What Kind of Nation Are We? What do we lose in a situation like that? Does it balance against any measurable gain? Or is there another way to go about reaching our goal?
Are we the kind of nation that turns 12 million members of our standing society into “dangerous aliens” undeserving of common rights? Is that what kind of nation we will remain in 2009? Public News Service sounds a clear warning in Immigration Policy Blamed for Latino Deaths in NY and Nation.
Are we going to continue to be the kind of nation that makes immigrant women pay, with their bodies, for laws that deprive them of a safe and accessible avenue to rights other women possess? Feministing tells of Latinas and self-induced abortions and the growing use of the drug for self-induced abortions. “The story is the same; immigrant women choose these do-it-yourself abortions for financial reasons, or out of fear of telling their family members, over safer procedures in clinics and hospitals.”
Time and time again, wielding such a heavy hand in response to immigrant issues involves losing touch with the basic humanity a situation requires. You make things worse. Things get out of control. People suffer very real consequences.
In 2009, let’s be a nation of those who help each other; who learn from each other; who stop tearing at our own roots so we can grow together.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.