No match, No justice

Today, The Progressive published a great op-ed by Marissa Graciosa - here is the full article, you can click over here to read the orginal post and comment!

The Bush Administration is wrongly forcing government contractors to verify the legal status of their work force with the Social Security Administration.

For me, this is personal.

My mother taught me how to write my numbers. Raised in the Philippines and schooled by nuns who traced their roots back to Spain, she makes her 1s like a lot of Europeans — straight sticks with a leaf-like line coming off the top toward the left and the whole thing leaning toward the right as resting in the shade from the afternoon sun.

My 1s are my mother’s descendants, but anyone might easily mistake my 1s for 7s. And if a clerk for the Social Security Administration makes that mistake or other mistakes like that it could cost me and 13 million Americans our jobs.

The Social Security Administration’s “match list” is notoriously error prone. The agency’s own inspector general found that 13 million of the 17.8 million “no matches” were actually U.S. citizens. So the assumption that if you don’t have a match, then you’re here illegally is wrong at least 70 percent of the time! The discrepancies had occurred because of clerical errors or other innocent things, such as name changes from marriages or divorces.

The unreliability of the “match list” figured prominently in the reasoning of the U.S. District Court for Northern California, which ruled last year that the practice would harm thousands of innocent workers and employers. In another case, an appellate court in California this June ordered the company that runs the Staples Center in Los Angeles to reinstate 33 janitors it had summarily fired after receiving “no match” letters.

But this has not deterred President Bush. On June 9, he signed an executive order requiring all contractors and other companies that do business with the federal government to verify their employee’s identity in the federal Social Security database.

The Social Security Administration has better things to do. Chasing after undocumented immigrants who have Social Security taxes deducted from their incomes but don’t ever withdraw from the system because their ID numbers are false, not only wastes government’s time but actually robs us of that additional tax income.

Meanwhile, millions of U.S. citizens are also terrorized in the process by businesses looking for any excuse to abuse and fire workers.

And employers looking to evade the ruling will resort to sub-contracting more of their workforce, a practice that reliably lowers wages and benefits across the economy. In an interconnected economy, we need solutions that help all of us, rather than finger-pointing as we collectively race to the bottom.

My 1s might look funny, but why put me and 13 million Americans at risk at a time of growing economic uncertainty? Unfortunately, that’s not a typo.

Marissa Graciosa is the campaign coordinator for the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, a national coalition of more than 300 grassroots organizations led by the Center for Community Change. She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.

LISTEN: Life as an Undocumented Student

From NPR -

College life, for any undergraduate student, is often met with challenges that can sometimes seem larger than life. Those same challenges can be even more burdensome for undocumented immigrants on campuses across the U.S.

Kent Wong, editor of Underground Undergrads and director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education, is joined by Mariana Zamboni, who attended college as an undocumented immigrant. The two discuss how the nation’s immigration debate, for some students, shapes the college experience.

Listen to the discussion here.

F*@$ you Brown Boy!

I highly recommend that everyone click over to Citizen Orange and read kyledeb’s post on blogging during Obama’s appearance in front of the National Council of La Raza.

Rather than cover what was ocurring inside, Kyle ventured outside to see what kind of public attention the event was garnering. Here is an excerpt - there is some vulgar language involved, as a disclaimer:

Arizona Burning - What would you do?

From Imagine 2050, comes a great post on the currently raging immigration debate and what the author views as the debate’s epicenter - the state of Arizona.

Did you ever play the “If I had lived during [insert appropriate historic period here] I would have . . .” game? Back when I was a kid my friends and I would sit in a tight circle often with popsicles juice running down our fingers while we discussed how each of us would have reacted to the Great Chicago Fire, escaped the Titanic, survived in the Land of the Lost, or ran bootleg rum from Canada, though I’m sure we didn’t even know what rum was.

As we grew older the game changed and took on even more significance. It was no longer made up of fantasies of how I would have invested in Disney and made it rich. Instead, I thought about how I might imagine myself reacting to important moments in U.S. history. Actually it was just one moment that fascinated me, the one called the Civil Rights Movement. “Would I have been able to keep my cool desegregating a lunch counter?” “Could I have worked up the courage and registered to vote knowing that I might get a visit from the Klan that evening?” Would I have left the comfortable confines of college to spend my summer in a place that very well might cost me my life?”

The author then moves on to point out that we are currently living through one of these historical moments - the immigrant rights movement.

In Arizona, like the tattered pages of an old paperback, the wondering is long over. With over 181 bodies recovered in the deserts in 2007, fifty five pieces of anti-immigrant legislation to be submitted in 2008, and a local Sheriff who resembles Bull Connor (a southern police officer and KKK member in the 1960’s) more than Wyatt Earp, Arizona is becoming to immigrants rights, what Mississippi was to the 1960s civil rights movement—a defining moment in which each of us will be called to either embrace inhumanity or redeem the soul of America.

When the author asks himself if the message of immigrants’ rights groups is extreme, he responds:

That hundreds of people dying in the desert each year is extreme, children coming home to empty kitchens where parents have disappeared is extreme, beings jailed for seeking work is extreme. Asking that each individual in our society be treated with basic human decency is not—it is as American as apple pie. It’s what we have been seeking since 1776.

If you were around for the immigration debate in 2008, what would you do?

Traffic Jam? Blame Immigrants!

From AlterNet:

By César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

Since the rampant anti-Chinese xenophobia of the late 1800s that led to our modern immigration laws, debate about immigration has been a wellspring of racism. Last month an advertisement in the New York Times (also printed in The Nation magazine) linking high gas prices, population control, and immigration proved that immigration restrictionists have not forgotten the tired arguments of the past.

The ad, paid for by “America’s Leadership Team for Long Range Population-Immigration-Resource Planning,” shows a traffic-clogged highway above the caption “One of America’s Most Popular Pastimes.” It argues that traffic jams will only get worse as the nation’s population grows and that 82 percent of growth between 2005 and 2050 will result from immigration. “[Q]uality of life for future generations will be gone unless we take action today,” the ad urges, leaving the unmistakable impression that the answer to our traffic problems–and to the “stress with our schools, our emergency rooms, our public infrastructure, even our water resources”–is to be found in ending, or at least seriously curtailing, immigration.

The ad is plagued by two fatal misrepresentations. First, the study it cites, the Pew Hispanic Center’s latest population projections report, notes that almost half the immigration-related population growth will consist of children born in this country to immigrant parents, and not from newcomers. These children are automatically entitled to citizenship because the Constitution says so. The Fourteenth Amendment couldn’t be any clearer: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Sure, there is legal precedent for declaring certain groups of people as not “persons” — the infamous Dred Scott, for example, or the line of cases that limited citizenship to “white” people and then set out to carefully mark the contours of that label — but do we really want to go there yet again?

Keep reading below…

Taking a bite out of Immigration Policy

There is a great opinion piece in Phoenix’s East Valley Tribune that approaches the immigration debate from a historical perspective - starting with the hot dog.

As we approach 4th of July weekend, millions of Americans will be eating that quintessential symbol of the USA. But, as the article points out, hot dogs were an “invention” of German immigrants, who sold their traditional sausages from street carts in their new country.

“If I had been celebrating Independence Day 150 years ago, however, [they] wouldn’t have been on the menu. In those days, Germans weren’t considered Americans, or even white. When they fought over the most lucrative street corner for food vendors [against Italian immigrants] in the 1880s, the press called the incidents “race riots.”

The identity of America is constantly evolving. The question “Who is an American?” is not as easily answered as many nativists would like to believe.

Restrictionists have frozen images of a “true” America, as though our identity hasn’t changed since 1776. Stasis, however, is a fiction. Cultures do not stand still, nor should we want them to. We have the chance now to remake our immigration policy in the modern era, not by taking it back to the 1920s, but by grappling honestly with the fact that the American identity is always undergoing cultural change. Modernity challenges us to create a policy that recognizes the full humanity of all immigrants without regard to their racial identity.

So, as we gear up for 4th of July picnics, pool parties and cookouts, let’s remember that our identity has been molded and changed by a wonderfully diverse array of cultures, backgrounds and traditions. And it is still evolving. As it should be.

Click here for the full article.

 

Undocumented - A Cautionary Tale

Check out this powerful post from Immigration Prof Blog about a U.S.-born African American citizen who has found himself slapped with the label of  being undocumented.

I’m African-American and my family moved to California almost a hundred years ago after a lynching took place outside their hometown in Kentucky. I’m also undocumented, or in the current anti-immigrant vernacular,”illegal.” I don’t have the necessary documents to prove my identity.

Therefore, within four years, I won’t be able to vote, have access to social services, or receive state identification to travel. Let’s start from the beginning:

Click here for the full post.

Op-Ed: Real Change Happens Off-Line

The Center for Community Change’s Sally Kohn wrote an op-ed piece yesterday for the Christian Science Monitor. In it, she discusses the Millenial generation (those born between 1980 and 1995) and their tendency towards a hyper-individualized approach to social change. Because of recent advances in technology have, in a sense, made the world smaller, Millenials are both more interconnected globally and more isolated individually.

Today’s American young people feel a deep connection to people in Tibet and Darfur, want to hold corporations accountable to environmental standards and worker justice, and value the role of government in meeting our shared needs. Yet the Internet tools that help Millennials appreciate our interconnectedness may actually erode the community values they seek.

As a “Millennial” myself (I’m still unsure how I feel about that label) the piece is thought-provoking and I think it may hold a certain amount of truth, though I’m not sure that I agree with a blanket generalization of myself and my peers.

Click here to read the full piece.

Thoughts?

Mass Deportation: Lessons From the Past

From DMI Blog comes a great post analyzing the historical precedent for the current “enforcement only” policy waging a war on immigrants.

From the little-known mass deportation of Mexican migrants during the Great Depression to the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, our nation has a history of scapegoating the migrant in times of crisis.

Unfortunately, throughout US history, when harsh measures are done in the name of national security, it is often directed at unpopular ethnic/racial minorities. It is easy to draw a parallel between the repatriation of the 1930s and the internment of the Japanese to the measures taken by the US government after September 11 because the policies that were passed after 9/11 proved to be no different. Racial profiling in this sense is a tool that Americans turn to when a perceived outsider threatens to damage the status quo.

These past incarnations of the current immigration panic and mass deportation have apparently not served as lessons learned.

The current fervor against immigrant groups is eerily reminiscent to the anti-Mexican sentiments of the 1930s. FBI reports on domestic hate crimes after 2001 indicate that such crimes against Latinas and Latinos surged from 2003 to 2006.

Click here for the full post.

Who is an American?

From Minneapolis Public Radio -

Check out this radio program discussing what it means to be American and touching on the identity of immigrants in our nation…

St. Paul, Minn. — In his book “The Thirteen American Arguments,” Howard Fineman writes that only a nation of immigrants can argue so earnestly and endlessly about who can become one of its own.

In the first of a series inspired by Fineman’s book, “The Thirteen American Arguments,” Midmorning examines the nature of citizenship, national identity, and what it means to be an American with two scholars well-versed in the immigration debate.

Guests

Stanley Renshon: Professor of political science at the City University of New York and a certified psychoanalyst. He’s the author of 13 books, including “The 50% American: Immigration and National Identity in an Age of Terrorism.”

Bill Hing: Professor of law at the University of California-Davis School of Law. He is the author of “Deporting Our Souls: Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy” and “Defining America Through Immigration Policy.”

The conversation is a bit sprawling but worth a listen!

Click here to listen to the audio program.