Univision snags Obama interview
By: Josh Gerstein
February 13, 2009 09:02 PM EST
President Obama is vowing to call attention to immigration issues in his first months in office, but he is stopping short of promising to introduce immigration reform legislation anytime soon.
In a 10-minute interview Thursday with Univision’s Spanish-language radio show, El Pistolero, Obama was asked if he would act on immigration reform within three months.
“What I’ve said is that, in the first 90 days, I want to get a group of members of Congress who are interested in the issue, employers, workers, immigrants rights groups, I want to get them around the table to start moving forward on the agenda,” Obama said. “There are a lot of things that we can do to help prepare for comprehensive immigration reform. For example, one thing that we can do right away is to start making it easier for people who are applying for legal immigration status to apply and do so in a way that is not so expensive for them — where we’re eliminating some of these backlogs so families can reunify more quickly.”
Obama called immigration reform “a top priority for the country,” but he was vague about when he might introduce any legislation on the subject.
Asked if he would support a moratorium on workplace immigrations raids that Latino groups have complained often separate mothers from children, Obama was sympathetic but noncommittal, and said it was the kind of issue he’d like to have reviewed by the study group he plans to set up. “Let’s take into account some of the strains that are being placed on families that are basically here due to the lack of jobs in Mexico,” he said. “Our immigration system is broken and we need to fix it.”
The president also said Hispanics were being particularly hard hit by the current recession. “The effects of this economy on people losing their jobs, losing their homes is so serious and it’s especially serious for Latinos. We’ve actually seen that Latinos are being affected worse than a lot of other communities because many people were involved in construction,” he said.
At another point in the interview, Obama said Mexican President Felipe Calderon, whom he met during the transition, “seems like an excellent person.” Obama said he hoped to travel to Mexico “in the near future,” but he did not give a date.
Obama’s chat with El Pistolero was the president’s first known radio interview since the Inauguration. As the interview wrapped up with a “gracias” from the host, Obama responded with a “muchas gracias” of his own.
2.23.2009
Report: Parents of 100,000 U.S. citizens deported
More than 100,000 parents whose children are U.S. citizens were deported over the decade that ended in 2007, a Department of Homeland Security's investigation has found.
The parents were removed from the country on immigration violations or because they had committed crimes. The removals of the 108,434 parents were among the approximately 2.2 million carried out by immigration officials between 1998 and 2007, Homeland Security Inspector General Richard Skinner said in a report made public Friday.
Skinner warned the numbers were incomplete because Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn't fully document such cases. The agency also does not keep track of how many children each parent has. He recommended immigration officials start collecting more data on removed parents and their children.
In response to the findings, ICE said it was looking into whether it can better track removals of immigrant parents citizens and the age of the immigrant's parents. Its study is due in about two months.
"I am saddened, but not surprised to learn that our government, in its harsh anti-immigrant stance, has split hundreds of thousands of families apart over the past decade," said Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y.
2.13.2009
Change Immigrants and Labor Can Believe In
THE NATION
Change Immigrants and Labor Can Believe In
By David Bacon
November 26, 2008
Since 2001 the Bush administration has deported more than a million people--including 349,041 individuals in the fiscal year ending just prior to the election. It has resurrected the discredited community sweeps and factory raids of earlier eras, and started sending waves of migrants to privately run jails for crimes like inventing a Social Security number to get a job. Every day in Tucson seventy young people, including many teenagers, are brought before a federal judge in heavy chains and sentenced to prison because they walked across the border.
It's no wonder that Latinos, Asians and other communities with large immigrant populations voted for Barack Obama by huge margins. People want and expect a change. Ending the administration's failed program of raids, jail time and deportations is at the top of the list. National demonstrations have called for a moratorium on raids since the summer, and one big reason why Los Angeles turned out so heavily for Obama was the anti-raid encampment and hunger strike in the Placita Olvera, which electrified the city.
But the raids program has been rejected by more than immigrants alone. The election took place as millions of people were losing their jobs and homes. Yet while Lou Dobbs and the talk show hysteria-mongers tried to scapegoat immigrants for this crisis ("What about illegal don't you understand?"), most voters did not drink the Kool-Aid. In fact, every poll shows that a big majority reject raids and want basic rights and fair treatment for everyone, immigrants included. The political coalition that put Obama into office--African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, women and union families--expects change.
The country needs not just an end to raids but a move away from the policies they've been intended to promote. From the beginning, the administration's enforcement program has been cynically designed to pressure Congress into re-establishing discredited guest-worker schemes called "close to slavery" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, being reminiscent of the old bracero program. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called these raids "closing the back door and opening the front door."
At least Chertoff was honest about his intentions. His underlings at Homeland Security, like Julie Myers, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), tried to pretend that the imprisonment and deportation of abused workers was a form of labor standards enforcement. Meanwhile, actual protection for US wages, working conditions and union rights has been in free fall for eight years. Other Homeland Security officials mendaciously claimed immigrants were a threat to national security, as though imprisoning hungry teenagers or terrorized workers would help a fearful public to sleep at night.
No one whose eyes are open to the terrible human suffering caused by these draconian policies will be very sorry to see Chertoff go. But what policies will take their place, and who will enforce them? So far, the choice of Janet Napolitano is not encouraging. The Tucson "Operation Streamline" court convenes in her home state every day, and the situation of immigrants in Arizona is worse than almost anywhere else.
Napolitano herself has publicly supported most of the worst ideas of the Bush administration, including guest-worker programs with no amnesty for the currently undocumented, and brutal enforcement schemes like E-Verify and workplace raids. But Obama does not have to be imprisoned by the failure of Napolitano to imagine a more progressive alternative. In fact, his new administration's need to respond to the economic crisis, and to strengthen the political coalition that won the election, can open new possibilities for a just and fair immigration policy.
Economic crisis does not have to pit working people against one other, or lead to the further demonization of immigrants. In fact, there is common ground between immigrants, communities of color, unions, churches, civil rights organizations and working families. Legalization and immigrant rights can be tied to guaranteeing jobs for anyone who wants to work, and unions to raise wages and win better conditions for everyone in the workplace.
These are not revolutionary demands. In fact, they're what the Democratic Party used to stand for. Nor is the idea of combining them into a common program that is not just pie-in-the-sky. For two sessions of Congress, the Black Caucus and leaders like Sheila Jackson Lee and Barbara Lee have proposed legislation to create jobs, at the same time offering rights and legal status to immigrants without papers. The AFL-CIO's campaign for the Employee Free Choice Act supports the surest means of ending the low-wage, second-class status of immigrant workers-- organizing unions. And repealing unfair trade agreements and ending structural adjustment policies would raise the standard of living and reduce the pressure for migration in Oaxaca or El Salvador, while making jobs more secure in working-class communities in the United States.
Justice for immigrants does not have to be the third rail of US politics, as Rahm Emmanuel has called it. Instead, immigrant rights is the demand of one part of a broad coalition that seeks fundamental social change. Immigrants can't achieve justice on their own, but then no element of this coalition can win its demands in isolation. Only a common-ground strategy can actually achieve the changes people hoped for when they went to the polls. Stopping the raids is the first step in a process that will help to end the nightmare of the past few years, and at the same time can help the administration begin to address the larger issues of immigration reform, jobs and workplace rights.
Something is clearly wrong with immigration enforcement. Desperate workers get fired and deported, families get terrorized and divided, while the government protects employers and seeks to turn a family-based immigration system into a managed labor supply for business. Even before presenting a reform plan to Congress, the Obama administration has the power to change some of the worst elements of the Bush program by administrative and executive action. What Bush put in place by fiat can be changed by the same process. In its first 100 days, a new administration could take simple steps to protect human and workplace rights, instead of allowing the abuse to continue:
* Stop ICE from seeking serious federal criminal charges, with incarceration in privately run prisons, when a worker lacks papers or has a bad Social Security number.
* Stop raiding workplaces, especially where workers are trying to organize unions or enforce wage and hour laws. This would help all workers, not just immigrants.
* Halt community sweeps, checkpoints and roadblocks, where agents use warrants for one or two people to detain and deport dozens of others. End the government's campaign to repeal local sanctuary ordinances and drag local law enforcement into immigration raids.
* Double the paltry 742 federal inspectors responsible for all US wage and hour violations and focus on industries where immigrants are concentrated. The National Labor Relations Board could target employers who use immigration threats to violate union rights.
* Allow all workers to apply for a Social Security number and pay legally into a system that benefits everyone. Social Security numbers should be used for their true purpose--paying retirement and disability benefits--not to fire immigrants from their jobs and send them to prison.
* Re-establish worker protections, ended under Bush, connected with existing guest-worker programs; force employers to hire domestically first and decertify any contractor guilty of labor violations.
* Restore human rights in border communities, stop construction of the border wall between the US and Mexico, and disband the Operation Streamline federal court, where scores of young border crossers are sent to prison in chains every day.
Democrats still have to decide what reforms to bring before Congress, and when. Some would delay action for a year or more. But the US Chamber of Commerce and dozens of trade groups have been pushing for years for big guest-worker programs. They are more than willing to accept raids and enforcement as a price, and are already working to bring back the "comprehensive" bills that would give them what they want. Instead of arguing over "what's politically possible" in Congress, immigrant and labor rights activists need a movement for a progressive alternative.
That alternative has to strengthen human rights on both sides of the global divide. In countries like Mexico and the Philippines, the families of migrants are fighting for real development instead of poverty, forced migration and a remittance-based economy. Here in the United States, movements in immigrant communities have brought millions of people into the streets on May Day, and continue to fight the raids and deportations. We need proposals that address both the situation of immigrants here and the conditions in their countries that force them to migrate.
To move towards equality and rights in the United States:
A law to give permanent residence (green-card) visas to the undocumented, and clear up the backlog of people already waiting for them abroad. If visas were more easily available, people wouldn't have to cross the border without them. Employer sanctions that make it a crime for immigrants to hold a job should be repealed. Guest-worker programs with a record of abuse should be ended, as they were in 1964.
To end the displacement at the root of most forced migration:
A new approach to trade policy, including renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and rejection of potential new trade agreements with countries like Colombia. Protecting corporate access to markets and low wages leads to rising poverty and the displacement of communities. We need to concentrate on the welfare of people at the bottom rather than the top, help grassroots communities of farmers stay on their land, and boost wages and employment for urban workers. Instead of subsidizing war and displacement, US tax dollars could expand rural credit, education and healthcare abroad, easing the pressure behind migration.
A new administration that has raised such high expectations should look for new ideas in the areas of immigration reform and trade policy, not recycle the bad ones of the last few years. The constituency that won the election will support a change in direction, and in fact is demanding it. The Obama administration owes its victory to that constituency, and its promises of change that brought it to the polls. Now it needs to deliver.
Change Immigrants and Labor Can Believe In
By David Bacon
November 26, 2008
Since 2001 the Bush administration has deported more than a million people--including 349,041 individuals in the fiscal year ending just prior to the election. It has resurrected the discredited community sweeps and factory raids of earlier eras, and started sending waves of migrants to privately run jails for crimes like inventing a Social Security number to get a job. Every day in Tucson seventy young people, including many teenagers, are brought before a federal judge in heavy chains and sentenced to prison because they walked across the border.
It's no wonder that Latinos, Asians and other communities with large immigrant populations voted for Barack Obama by huge margins. People want and expect a change. Ending the administration's failed program of raids, jail time and deportations is at the top of the list. National demonstrations have called for a moratorium on raids since the summer, and one big reason why Los Angeles turned out so heavily for Obama was the anti-raid encampment and hunger strike in the Placita Olvera, which electrified the city.
But the raids program has been rejected by more than immigrants alone. The election took place as millions of people were losing their jobs and homes. Yet while Lou Dobbs and the talk show hysteria-mongers tried to scapegoat immigrants for this crisis ("What about illegal don't you understand?"), most voters did not drink the Kool-Aid. In fact, every poll shows that a big majority reject raids and want basic rights and fair treatment for everyone, immigrants included. The political coalition that put Obama into office--African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, women and union families--expects change.
The country needs not just an end to raids but a move away from the policies they've been intended to promote. From the beginning, the administration's enforcement program has been cynically designed to pressure Congress into re-establishing discredited guest-worker schemes called "close to slavery" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, being reminiscent of the old bracero program. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called these raids "closing the back door and opening the front door."
At least Chertoff was honest about his intentions. His underlings at Homeland Security, like Julie Myers, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), tried to pretend that the imprisonment and deportation of abused workers was a form of labor standards enforcement. Meanwhile, actual protection for US wages, working conditions and union rights has been in free fall for eight years. Other Homeland Security officials mendaciously claimed immigrants were a threat to national security, as though imprisoning hungry teenagers or terrorized workers would help a fearful public to sleep at night.
No one whose eyes are open to the terrible human suffering caused by these draconian policies will be very sorry to see Chertoff go. But what policies will take their place, and who will enforce them? So far, the choice of Janet Napolitano is not encouraging. The Tucson "Operation Streamline" court convenes in her home state every day, and the situation of immigrants in Arizona is worse than almost anywhere else.
Napolitano herself has publicly supported most of the worst ideas of the Bush administration, including guest-worker programs with no amnesty for the currently undocumented, and brutal enforcement schemes like E-Verify and workplace raids. But Obama does not have to be imprisoned by the failure of Napolitano to imagine a more progressive alternative. In fact, his new administration's need to respond to the economic crisis, and to strengthen the political coalition that won the election, can open new possibilities for a just and fair immigration policy.
Economic crisis does not have to pit working people against one other, or lead to the further demonization of immigrants. In fact, there is common ground between immigrants, communities of color, unions, churches, civil rights organizations and working families. Legalization and immigrant rights can be tied to guaranteeing jobs for anyone who wants to work, and unions to raise wages and win better conditions for everyone in the workplace.
These are not revolutionary demands. In fact, they're what the Democratic Party used to stand for. Nor is the idea of combining them into a common program that is not just pie-in-the-sky. For two sessions of Congress, the Black Caucus and leaders like Sheila Jackson Lee and Barbara Lee have proposed legislation to create jobs, at the same time offering rights and legal status to immigrants without papers. The AFL-CIO's campaign for the Employee Free Choice Act supports the surest means of ending the low-wage, second-class status of immigrant workers-- organizing unions. And repealing unfair trade agreements and ending structural adjustment policies would raise the standard of living and reduce the pressure for migration in Oaxaca or El Salvador, while making jobs more secure in working-class communities in the United States.
Justice for immigrants does not have to be the third rail of US politics, as Rahm Emmanuel has called it. Instead, immigrant rights is the demand of one part of a broad coalition that seeks fundamental social change. Immigrants can't achieve justice on their own, but then no element of this coalition can win its demands in isolation. Only a common-ground strategy can actually achieve the changes people hoped for when they went to the polls. Stopping the raids is the first step in a process that will help to end the nightmare of the past few years, and at the same time can help the administration begin to address the larger issues of immigration reform, jobs and workplace rights.
Something is clearly wrong with immigration enforcement. Desperate workers get fired and deported, families get terrorized and divided, while the government protects employers and seeks to turn a family-based immigration system into a managed labor supply for business. Even before presenting a reform plan to Congress, the Obama administration has the power to change some of the worst elements of the Bush program by administrative and executive action. What Bush put in place by fiat can be changed by the same process. In its first 100 days, a new administration could take simple steps to protect human and workplace rights, instead of allowing the abuse to continue:
* Stop ICE from seeking serious federal criminal charges, with incarceration in privately run prisons, when a worker lacks papers or has a bad Social Security number.
* Stop raiding workplaces, especially where workers are trying to organize unions or enforce wage and hour laws. This would help all workers, not just immigrants.
* Halt community sweeps, checkpoints and roadblocks, where agents use warrants for one or two people to detain and deport dozens of others. End the government's campaign to repeal local sanctuary ordinances and drag local law enforcement into immigration raids.
* Double the paltry 742 federal inspectors responsible for all US wage and hour violations and focus on industries where immigrants are concentrated. The National Labor Relations Board could target employers who use immigration threats to violate union rights.
* Allow all workers to apply for a Social Security number and pay legally into a system that benefits everyone. Social Security numbers should be used for their true purpose--paying retirement and disability benefits--not to fire immigrants from their jobs and send them to prison.
* Re-establish worker protections, ended under Bush, connected with existing guest-worker programs; force employers to hire domestically first and decertify any contractor guilty of labor violations.
* Restore human rights in border communities, stop construction of the border wall between the US and Mexico, and disband the Operation Streamline federal court, where scores of young border crossers are sent to prison in chains every day.
Democrats still have to decide what reforms to bring before Congress, and when. Some would delay action for a year or more. But the US Chamber of Commerce and dozens of trade groups have been pushing for years for big guest-worker programs. They are more than willing to accept raids and enforcement as a price, and are already working to bring back the "comprehensive" bills that would give them what they want. Instead of arguing over "what's politically possible" in Congress, immigrant and labor rights activists need a movement for a progressive alternative.
That alternative has to strengthen human rights on both sides of the global divide. In countries like Mexico and the Philippines, the families of migrants are fighting for real development instead of poverty, forced migration and a remittance-based economy. Here in the United States, movements in immigrant communities have brought millions of people into the streets on May Day, and continue to fight the raids and deportations. We need proposals that address both the situation of immigrants here and the conditions in their countries that force them to migrate.
To move towards equality and rights in the United States:
A law to give permanent residence (green-card) visas to the undocumented, and clear up the backlog of people already waiting for them abroad. If visas were more easily available, people wouldn't have to cross the border without them. Employer sanctions that make it a crime for immigrants to hold a job should be repealed. Guest-worker programs with a record of abuse should be ended, as they were in 1964.
To end the displacement at the root of most forced migration:
A new approach to trade policy, including renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and rejection of potential new trade agreements with countries like Colombia. Protecting corporate access to markets and low wages leads to rising poverty and the displacement of communities. We need to concentrate on the welfare of people at the bottom rather than the top, help grassroots communities of farmers stay on their land, and boost wages and employment for urban workers. Instead of subsidizing war and displacement, US tax dollars could expand rural credit, education and healthcare abroad, easing the pressure behind migration.
A new administration that has raised such high expectations should look for new ideas in the areas of immigration reform and trade policy, not recycle the bad ones of the last few years. The constituency that won the election will support a change in direction, and in fact is demanding it. The Obama administration owes its victory to that constituency, and its promises of change that brought it to the polls. Now it needs to deliver.
2.12.2009
Legalization Would Boost Economy During Recession
by Dave Bennion
Published January 27, 2009 @ 08:00AM PST
Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda writes that immigration reform is not only a human rights issue, but could give a boost to the economy even in a recession, just like the last legalization did. (pdf)
Legalization increases short-term incomes, job creating consumption and net tax revenues in the low wage segments of the labor market, as well as sets the long-term foundation for an expanding middle class and a more sustainable economic recovery. The experience of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) is very instructive in this regard, producing both wage and consumption gains, and enhanced tax-revenue collection in the midst of a recession of the late 1980's and early 1990's, as well as decades of very high rates of educational, home and small business investments by newly legalized families. If Congress and President Obama legalized the current 10-12 million undocumented persons in the U.S. an economic stimulus of $30-36 billion in personal income, 750,000-900,000 new jobs, and $4.5 to $5.4 billion in net tax revenue would result!
. . .
Almost immediately, IRCA-based legalization had the effect of giving rights to more workers, raising the low wage floor of the economy, reducing the demand for easily exploitable immigrants, reducing illegal crossings and apprehensions (-- without huge expenditures on a border wall).
Furthermore, the question is not whether we have reached the point of diminishing returns from enforcement-only policies, but how long ago.
Massive security-related expenditure growth now yields lower numbers of apprehensions as migration from Mexico to the US (both undocumented and legal) has been dropping due to security measures, the climate of repression in immigrant communities, and the declining regional economy. The unintended consequences of further pursuing the current enforcement only approach include generating a vulnerable underground economy and maintaining an artificially low wage floor, actually encouraging the demand for vulnerable undocumented workers.
I hope that on immigration reform, Obama listens to the voices that are making the most sense, not just the ones yelling the loudest.
This comes by way of Greg Siskind, who predicts that H-1B nonimmigrant worker visa petitions for highly-skilled workers will drop due to the recession. He points out that anyone who thinks the H-1B is a free ride-for immigrant workers or for their employers-doesn't know much about the process:
H-1Bs are expensive - often $6000 or more when you factor in legal fees and hefty government filing fees. That is money most companies would rather spend elsewhere. H-1B applications take time - often at least six months of waiting for a visa number to become available after filing an application. They're a pain in the neck from a bureaucratic standpoint - posting requirements, public access files, representations to the US government, etc. The typical communications issues one would expect with foreign workers often add additional challenges. And you have uncertainty regarding the long term prospects for retaining the employee since getting a green card is often an expensive proposition with no guarantees of success.
Even if H-1B filings drop, though, all the available visas could still be used up on the first day they are made available, as they were the last two years. But raising the H-1B cap could be a tricky proposition in this recession.
2.11.2009
Border Art
Border and Immigration issues are not isolated to the American/Mexican Border but all developed countries with land or sea borders that can be accessed by underdeveloped countries. The movement of humanity is on the forefront of issues facing the globalization of the entire world, this in itself creates a fascinating opportunity for documenting the cultural and humanistic facet of this era. While many frontiers change or vanish as the tides of humanity shift, we must try to understand the emotion and the sensitivity of the people who want so desperately to catch up with the world and the confusion of those people having to find acceptance for them in order to truly find peace through sharing. Hopefully this will lead to discovering solutions to border issues relating to humanity instead of governments. This project is self-funded to preserve, the honesty, the integrity and the objectiveness, as humanly possible. It is my gift back to our world for the honor of experiencing life itself. All donations and proceeds from my art work on this web site, lectures, and exhibits, go directly to fund my documentary work so future generations will know what happened here, on our borders, at the turn of the century.
The Warmest Regards,
Karl W. Hoffman
Friendship Across Fences: Communion and Civil Disobedience on the U.S.-Mexico Border
Friendship Across Fences: Communion and Civil Disobedience on the U.S.-Mexico Border
by John Fanestil 02-11-2009
Photos by Karl W. HoffmanEach Sunday afternoon, people from San Diego and Tijuana gather to celebrate communion at a seaside plaza on the U.S.-Mexico border, where families and friends have been meeting for generations to visit through the border fence. The spot – known to locals as “Friendship Park” – sits atop Monument Mesa, so called because it features a monument marking the initial boundary point established in 1849 by the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission after the end of the U.S.-Mexico War.
At a meeting on January 6, 2009, Customs and Border Patrol officials announced that they had finalized plans to wall off Friendship Park. By the time they are done, there will be a second wall at a distance of about 120 feet north of the border fence, with a high speed patrol road running in between. There will be a gate in this second wall, but it will be used for maintenance access only. These final plans will allow for no public access at any time, for any reason – neither to the historic marker on top of Monument Mesa, nor to the border fence on the beach below. They announced that the site would now be considered a construction zone and was closed to the public, effective immediately.
The act of celebrating communion with people on both sides of the border at Friendship Park is now an act of civil disobedience.
So it came to pass that this past Sunday (January 25) we celebrated the sacrament of communion by passing the bread and cup across TWO different fences. As always, there were people on the Mexican side of the border fence. But this week, some of us chose to climb around the mesh fence that now marks off the construction zone at Friendship Park. This left some of our friends, who had not come prepared to engage in civil disobedience, standing behind the mesh fence.
I decided to place the communion elements precisely at the intersection of the two fences – one fence made of steel, running east to west, marking an international boundary; the other fence made of mesh, running south to north, marking off a new patch of U.S. soil that has just been declared by the U.S. government off limits to U.S. citizens.
I began: “On the night in which Jesus gave himself up for us, he took bread … En la noche en que se entregó por nosotros, Jesús tomó el pan …”
Rev. John Fanestil is an ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church and Executive Director of the Foundation for Change. You can join Friends of Friendship Park on Facebook.
Karl W. Hoffman has done extensive documentary photojournalism on the U.S.-Mexico border. See more of his photos at: www.livingontheborder.com
A Sense of Who We Are ..
The New York Times
January 13, 2009
..Editorial..
..A Sense of Who We Are ..
A scene from the last days of the Bush administration: On a snowy afternoon last weekend, a church in New York City is filled to bursting with more than 1,000 people. Parents holding babies, teenagers, old men and women with heavy coats and canes. They murmur and shout in prayer, a keyboard and guitar carrying their voices to the height of the vaulted ceiling.
The music has a deafening buoyancy, but as congregants step forward to speak, their testimony is heavy with foreboding and sorrow. They tell of families terrorized and split apart.
A young woman from Pakistan describes humiliating conditions at a detention center in Elizabeth, N.J., where she was sent with her mother and ailing father. A mother tells of her son, an Army sergeant and citizen, losing his wife to deportation. A Mexican man, with theatrical defiance, waves a shoe at the unnamed forces that have thwarted his desire to legalize.
It is hard to appear sinister in a church, and the congregation at Iglesia La Sinagoga, a center of Pentecostalism on 125th Street in East Harlem, seemed utterly ordinary. But as undocumented immigrants and their loved ones, they are the main targets of the Bush administration’s immigration war.
Families like theirs have endured a relentless campaign of intimidation and expulsion, organized at the top levels of the federal government and haphazardly delegated to state and local governments.
The campaign has been disproportionate and cruel. The evidence is everywhere.
On Monday, The Times reported that federal immigration prosecutions had soared in the last five years, overloading federal courts with misdemeanor cases of illegal border crossers, who are tried and sentenced in groups of 40 to 60 for efficiency. At the same time, prosecutions for weapons, organized crime, public corruption and drugs have plummeted. The Arizona attorney general called the situation “a national abdication by the Justice Department.”
And last week, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in an appalling last-minute ruling, declared that immigrants do not have the constitutional right to a lawyer in a deportation hearing and thus have no right to appeal on the grounds of bad legal representation. Mr. Mukasey overturned a decades-old practice designed to ensure robust constitutional protection for immigrants — one needed now more than ever in the days of the Bush administration’s assembly-line prosecutions.
The event at the Pentecostal church was organized by local ministers and Democratic politicians to spur the cause of immigration reform this year.
It could be a difficult case to make. We heard far too little about the need for immigration reform from President-elect Barack Obama during the general election — and virtually nothing from the nation’s leaders since then. But the United States cannot afford to put immigration on a back burner and merely continue with the existing enforcement regime. The costs are too high for the country’s values. And they are too high for the economy.
Defending immigrants’ rights defends standards in all workplaces. Workers who are terrorized into submission, in families that are destroyed by deportation and raids, are more likely to undercut other workers by tolerating low pay and miserable job conditions.
Restoring proportionality and good sense to the criminal justice system also would free up resources for fighting serious crimes. Most important, repairing a system warped by political priorities into hunting down and punishing the wrong people — like those bringing their suffering to a Pentecostal church — would help restore a sense of what the country stands for, and remind us of who we are.
January 13, 2009
..Editorial..
..A Sense of Who We Are ..
A scene from the last days of the Bush administration: On a snowy afternoon last weekend, a church in New York City is filled to bursting with more than 1,000 people. Parents holding babies, teenagers, old men and women with heavy coats and canes. They murmur and shout in prayer, a keyboard and guitar carrying their voices to the height of the vaulted ceiling.
The music has a deafening buoyancy, but as congregants step forward to speak, their testimony is heavy with foreboding and sorrow. They tell of families terrorized and split apart.
A young woman from Pakistan describes humiliating conditions at a detention center in Elizabeth, N.J., where she was sent with her mother and ailing father. A mother tells of her son, an Army sergeant and citizen, losing his wife to deportation. A Mexican man, with theatrical defiance, waves a shoe at the unnamed forces that have thwarted his desire to legalize.
It is hard to appear sinister in a church, and the congregation at Iglesia La Sinagoga, a center of Pentecostalism on 125th Street in East Harlem, seemed utterly ordinary. But as undocumented immigrants and their loved ones, they are the main targets of the Bush administration’s immigration war.
Families like theirs have endured a relentless campaign of intimidation and expulsion, organized at the top levels of the federal government and haphazardly delegated to state and local governments.
The campaign has been disproportionate and cruel. The evidence is everywhere.
On Monday, The Times reported that federal immigration prosecutions had soared in the last five years, overloading federal courts with misdemeanor cases of illegal border crossers, who are tried and sentenced in groups of 40 to 60 for efficiency. At the same time, prosecutions for weapons, organized crime, public corruption and drugs have plummeted. The Arizona attorney general called the situation “a national abdication by the Justice Department.”
And last week, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in an appalling last-minute ruling, declared that immigrants do not have the constitutional right to a lawyer in a deportation hearing and thus have no right to appeal on the grounds of bad legal representation. Mr. Mukasey overturned a decades-old practice designed to ensure robust constitutional protection for immigrants — one needed now more than ever in the days of the Bush administration’s assembly-line prosecutions.
The event at the Pentecostal church was organized by local ministers and Democratic politicians to spur the cause of immigration reform this year.
It could be a difficult case to make. We heard far too little about the need for immigration reform from President-elect Barack Obama during the general election — and virtually nothing from the nation’s leaders since then. But the United States cannot afford to put immigration on a back burner and merely continue with the existing enforcement regime. The costs are too high for the country’s values. And they are too high for the economy.
Defending immigrants’ rights defends standards in all workplaces. Workers who are terrorized into submission, in families that are destroyed by deportation and raids, are more likely to undercut other workers by tolerating low pay and miserable job conditions.
Restoring proportionality and good sense to the criminal justice system also would free up resources for fighting serious crimes. Most important, repairing a system warped by political priorities into hunting down and punishing the wrong people — like those bringing their suffering to a Pentecostal church — would help restore a sense of what the country stands for, and remind us of who we are.
Rule by fear or rule by law?
Rule by fear or rule by law?
Lewis Seiler,Dan Hamburg
Monday, February 4, 2008
San Francisco Chronicle
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
- Winston Churchill, Nov. 21, 1943
Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and noncitizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of "an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs."
Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.
According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists."
Fraud-busters such as Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, have complained about these contracts, saying that more taxpayer dollars should not go to taxpayer-gouging Halliburton. But the real question is: What kind of "new programs" require the construction and refurbishment of detention facilities in nearly every state of the union with the capacity to house perhaps millions of people?
Sect. 1042 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," gives the executive the power to invoke martial law. For the first time in more than a century, the president is now authorized to use the military in response to "a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or any other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order."
The Military Commissions Act of 2006, rammed through Congress just before the 2006 midterm elections, allows for the indefinite imprisonment of anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on a list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government’s policies. The law calls for secret trials for citizens and noncitizens alike.
Also in 2007, the White House quietly issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51), to ensure "continuity of government" in the event of what the document vaguely calls a "catastrophic emergency." Should the president determine that such an emergency has occurred, he and he alone is empowered to do whatever he deems necessary to ensure "continuity of government." This could include everything from canceling elections to suspending the Constitution to launching a nuclear attack. Congress has yet to hold a single hearing on NSPD-51.
U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Venice (Los Angeles County) has come up with a new way to expand the domestic "war on terror." Her Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (HR1955), which passed the House by the lopsided vote of 404-6, would set up a commission to "examine and report upon the facts and causes" of so-called violent radicalism and extremist ideology, then make legislative recommendations on combatting it.
According to commentary in the Baltimore Sun, Rep. Harman and her colleagues from both sides of the aisle believe the country faces a native brand of terrorism, and needs a commission with sweeping investigative power to combat it.
A clue as to where Harman’s commission might be aiming is the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a law that labels those who "engage in sit-ins, civil disobedience, trespass, or any other crime in the name of animal rights" as terrorists. Other groups in the crosshairs could be anti-abortion protesters, anti-tax agitators, immigration activists, environmentalists, peace demonstrators, Second Amendment rights supporters ... the list goes on and on. According to author Naomi Wolf, the National Counterterrorism Center holds the names of roughly 775,000 "terror suspects" with the number increasing by 20,000 per month.
What could the government be contemplating that leads it to make contingency plans to detain without recourse millions of its own citizens?
The Constitution does not allow the executive to have unchecked power under any circumstances. The people must not allow the president to use the war on terrorism to rule by fear instead of by law.
Lewis Seiler is the president of Voice of the Environment, Inc. Dan Hamburg, a former congressman, is executive director.
This article appeared on page B - 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle
**************************************************
[link to www.sfgate.com]
No, it is no longer just Alex Jones and wacky militia groups who are saying this. Now it is in articles published by mainstream newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle. Are YOU on the ’terror suspect’ list? Those 20,000 extra every month are US citizens. Think about it. If you dare....
Economic aid to give Mexicans, Central Americans work at home
Economic aid to give Mexicans, Central Americans work at home
Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, January 7, 2008
From her office on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District, Diana Campoamor was networking - meeting for drinks with a banker, compiling a briefing book for a foundation trustee, exchanging phone calls with colleagues in Mexico City.
She was putting all the pieces in place so her group, Hispanics in Philanthropy, could cut its first check this month for a three-year, $219,000 grant to expand a goat-cheese cooperative in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico.
More goats, corrals, pasteurizing equipment and refrigerators should allow the operation to grow from one village to four, providing work for hundreds of peasant farmers who might otherwise join their siblings and cousins as illegal immigrants harvesting peaches, slaughtering chickens, driving nails and scrubbing dishes across the United States.
The group's decision to fund economic development projects in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, after almost 25 years working in U.S. Latino communities, is part of a movement taking hold in Northern California to tackle the root causes of illegal immigration.
"People don't leave their homes unless there's a hardship, economic or political," said Campoamor, the president of Hispanics in Philanthropy, who is herself a refugee from Cuba. "Everyone should have a choice. We want to help people have a job and a chance to stay where they are, and to have a voice in their communities and their countries."
Immigration is again moving front and center on the U.S. political stage. On the presidential campaign trail, Republicans are vying to be the toughest on sealing the border and enforcing immigration law, while Democrats temper the bad-cop rhetoric with talk of guest worker programs and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here.
But if there is to be a lasting solution to illegal immigration, experts say, it will involve changes not just on this side of the border but in Mexico and Central America, which together account for three fourths of the estimated 12 million undocumented people in the United States.
"As far as what I've read about what the candidates are saying, I don't see much discussion. It's cheap rhetoric," said Luis Guarnizo, a professor in the school of agriculture at UC Davis. "Everybody's looking for a quick fix, the right slogan. ... But we have to look at the larger picture. This is not just a law-and-order issue, it involves economic issues, social issues. Migration is a global process."
In Northern California, some grassroots development and immigrant groups are trying a different approach. They reason that if people in Latin America had a way to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty, they wouldn't need to leave home, risk their lives crossing the border and live on the margins of U.S. society to earn a living and support their relatives back home.
The projects range from small to large, and involve a variety of players - major foundations, socially conscious consumers and migrant workers themselves - in diverse approaches to improving life in some of the communities that are sending undocumented immigrants north. They're helping build lagging village infrastructure, incubating productive rural projects and giving farmers fair access to global markets.
Part of the solution
Luis Alberto Rivera is president of an association of Californians originally from his hometown, Coalcomán, in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. Seeing thousands of Coalcomanenses migrate to the United States, Rivera and his compatriots were determined to do something to help improve life back home.
"We decided to push the authorities to clean the rivers, because they're polluted," said Rivera, a U.S. citizen, from his home near Modesto. "The whole ecosystem, the ability of people to get food from the river is destroyed. People are migrating because their life is over when the rivers are polluted. But if we go back and restore them, I think that's part of the solution."
Rivera and members of his hometown association offered to fund a sewage treatment plant and talked the town government into installing a system of sewers to collect the wastewater. They've set a fundraising goal of $100,000 and have already held a couple of benefit dinners in the Central Valley.
And the group plans to apply for matching funds under the Three for One program, whereby the Mexican federal, state and local governments each pitch in a dollar for every dollar contributed to a project by Mexican migrants outside the country.
Recognizing the billions of dollars that expatriate Mexicans send home each year to their families, the Mexican authorities created the matching fund arrangement in 2002 to channel some of that money to public works. In 2006, more than 1,000 Mexican migrant groups contributed close to $20 million to community improvement projects in 845 rural and urban locations, according to Martha Esquivel of Mexico's Department of Social Development.
Rivera hopes his efforts will encourage more migrants to get involved with their hometowns in Mexico and work to fix the problems that forced them to leave home in the first place.
But some observers criticize the matching-fund program, saying it's the responsibility of the Mexican government to build clean water systems and to provide schools, ambulances and other infrastructure, not the duty of Mexicans who left home due to a lack of opportunity.
After years of being all but ignored by their government, however, "the Three for One begins to signal to remittance senders that they're going to get some respect," said Campoamor.
She is an advocate of building links between immigrants in the United States and their home countries, in the way that hometown associations do. But her organization has opted to channel its funds specifically into initiatives that create jobs in Latin American countries.
Creating jobs
In the village of Tamaula, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, Pedro Laguna hopes that expanding his five-family goat-farming cooperative with the grant from Hispanics in Philanthropy can help stanch the flow of young people to the United States.
"I have nine kids in the United States, three daughters and six sons, but I have very little communication with them," said the 60-year-old father of 13 in a telephone interview. "I don't want to lose my children. We want to invest in our community so we have work here where we live."
An agronomist is advising the cooperative on getting the goats to produce milk year-round, instead of seasonally. With more milk, the farmers can make more cheese and the sweet, caramelized dulce de leche known as cajeta, both of which sell well in Irapuato, the nearest city.
Laguna plans to pass on his cheese-making expertise to a group of women in another village who were left behind by husbands who migrated north, and to a youth group, the children of immigrants. Most urgently, he is working to persuade his 16-year-old daughter, his youngest child, to stay on the farm.
"At first she wanted to follow her brothers and sisters north, but I've been trying to convince her that going to the United States is not easy, and returning is less so," he said. "Little by little, she's thinking more about staying in school and training to make cheese. And she's realizing that she can sell her little goats to earn some money. When there are animals at home, there's work. And when there's work, there's money."
Hispanics in Philanthropy plans to make three-year grants to half a dozen more projects in Mexico this spring and to begin similar efforts in Nicaragua and Guatemala. The group is already working in the Dominican Republic and Argentina.
Fair Trade
On a larger scale, and with a somewhat different approach, Oakland-based TransFair USA is promoting fair trade coffee, tea, chocolate, bananas, rice and other agricultural products from Mexico and many other developing countries.
"Our goal is to give people the tools and the market access to lift themselves out of poverty. When you do that, people don't want to leave home," said TransFair founder and president Paul Rice.
Rice, who lived for 11 years in Nicaragua and is married to a Nicaraguan, said he has seen up close in his own family the intense pressures that push people to leave home and seek their fortunes in el norte.
In the early 1990s, after years of working on traditional development projects, Rice realized farmers needed not only access to capital and technical assistance, but better access to markets in order to flourish.
He helped a group of peasant coffee farmers sell their beans in Europe, where a fledgling fair trade market was taking hold, allowing small producers to earn a premium price by eliminating the middleman. Soon Rice was promoting the idea in the United States to businesses like Starbucks and Wal-Mart, eager to burnish their image as responsible corporations. His group is still the only fair trade certifying body in this country.
"Globalization has led to more trade and economic growth," he said. "But growth for whom? The benefits are not trickling down to the poor. Fair trade tries to make free trade work for the poor. ... It's not free trade if you depend on the guy who drives up in his pickup and says, 'The price is 10 cents a pound, take it or leave it.' "
Today, the coffee cooperative Rice started can guarantee $1.51 a pound to its 2,300 member families and still has money left over to invest in community projects.
"In Nicaragua, migration has been growing steadily over the past decade because of the lack of jobs," said Merling Preza, the cooperative's manager, speaking from the northern town of Estelí. "It's leading to family disintegration and a loss of values, and that means more social instability. But the small farmers who have organized into cooperatives and sell on the fair trade market don't need to leave their communities to survive."
All these efforts to create economic stability in Mexico and Central America are laudable, say observers, but by themselves they can only help a small fraction of the population. Wealth and complexity in a nation's economy are created by manufacturing goods, not selling raw materials, and above all, by investing in the country's human capital, said Guarnizo, the UC Davis professor.
"It's a political decision," he said. "Think of the case of India with high tech. How did they do it? Was it because Indians are very clever? No. It's because the state made a decision to put money into education. It took over 40 years, but they have that now."
But Mexico, where the economy does not currently create enough jobs for the population, has come to rely on the remittances sent home by migrant workers, said another immigration analyst, Jeff Faux, the director of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
"The deal works for the elites on both sides of the border. The U.S. business community gets cheap labor and suppresses wages, and the Mexican elite gets rid of people who are discontented and restless," he said. "But you can't develop a country by exporting your most ambitious people."
Faux has proposed that the United States give Mexico a push to develop its economy through investing in its own people. In an article in this month's American Prospect magazine, Faux suggests that the United States offer to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement to promote economic growth and a more equal distribution of wealth in Mexico. That, he said, could produce a real solution to illegal immigration.
In the meantime, groups in the Bay Area and beyond are determined to keep chipping away at the poverty that causes people to migrate. Building economic sustainability in Mexico and its poorer neighbors, they say, will do a lot more to prevent illegal immigration than putting up border fences or even offering guest worker visas.
In Tamaula, Pedro Laguna has built new roofs on his goat pens and when spring comes he'll be buying more animals. He hopes not only to keep his teenage daughter around, but to encourage some of his other children to return.
"I have one daughter in Georgia who hasn't worked for a year. She's going to come home and I'll have a job for her," he said. "I hope that in not too long, I'll be able to offer work to all of them."
Resources
Hispanics in Philanthropy:
www.hiponline.org, (415) 837-0427
TransFair USA:
www.transfairusa.org, (510) 663-5260
Three for One Program:
www.ime.gob.mx, (213) 487-6577
Hispanics in Philanthropy: www.hiponline.org, (415) 837-0427
TransFair USA, www.transfairusa.org, (510) 663-5260
Three for One Program: www.ime.gob.mx, (213) 487-6577
E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/07/MN16U0MHQ.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, January 7, 2008
From her office on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District, Diana Campoamor was networking - meeting for drinks with a banker, compiling a briefing book for a foundation trustee, exchanging phone calls with colleagues in Mexico City.
She was putting all the pieces in place so her group, Hispanics in Philanthropy, could cut its first check this month for a three-year, $219,000 grant to expand a goat-cheese cooperative in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico.
More goats, corrals, pasteurizing equipment and refrigerators should allow the operation to grow from one village to four, providing work for hundreds of peasant farmers who might otherwise join their siblings and cousins as illegal immigrants harvesting peaches, slaughtering chickens, driving nails and scrubbing dishes across the United States.
The group's decision to fund economic development projects in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, after almost 25 years working in U.S. Latino communities, is part of a movement taking hold in Northern California to tackle the root causes of illegal immigration.
"People don't leave their homes unless there's a hardship, economic or political," said Campoamor, the president of Hispanics in Philanthropy, who is herself a refugee from Cuba. "Everyone should have a choice. We want to help people have a job and a chance to stay where they are, and to have a voice in their communities and their countries."
Immigration is again moving front and center on the U.S. political stage. On the presidential campaign trail, Republicans are vying to be the toughest on sealing the border and enforcing immigration law, while Democrats temper the bad-cop rhetoric with talk of guest worker programs and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here.
But if there is to be a lasting solution to illegal immigration, experts say, it will involve changes not just on this side of the border but in Mexico and Central America, which together account for three fourths of the estimated 12 million undocumented people in the United States.
"As far as what I've read about what the candidates are saying, I don't see much discussion. It's cheap rhetoric," said Luis Guarnizo, a professor in the school of agriculture at UC Davis. "Everybody's looking for a quick fix, the right slogan. ... But we have to look at the larger picture. This is not just a law-and-order issue, it involves economic issues, social issues. Migration is a global process."
In Northern California, some grassroots development and immigrant groups are trying a different approach. They reason that if people in Latin America had a way to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty, they wouldn't need to leave home, risk their lives crossing the border and live on the margins of U.S. society to earn a living and support their relatives back home.
The projects range from small to large, and involve a variety of players - major foundations, socially conscious consumers and migrant workers themselves - in diverse approaches to improving life in some of the communities that are sending undocumented immigrants north. They're helping build lagging village infrastructure, incubating productive rural projects and giving farmers fair access to global markets.
Part of the solution
Luis Alberto Rivera is president of an association of Californians originally from his hometown, Coalcomán, in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. Seeing thousands of Coalcomanenses migrate to the United States, Rivera and his compatriots were determined to do something to help improve life back home.
"We decided to push the authorities to clean the rivers, because they're polluted," said Rivera, a U.S. citizen, from his home near Modesto. "The whole ecosystem, the ability of people to get food from the river is destroyed. People are migrating because their life is over when the rivers are polluted. But if we go back and restore them, I think that's part of the solution."
Rivera and members of his hometown association offered to fund a sewage treatment plant and talked the town government into installing a system of sewers to collect the wastewater. They've set a fundraising goal of $100,000 and have already held a couple of benefit dinners in the Central Valley.
And the group plans to apply for matching funds under the Three for One program, whereby the Mexican federal, state and local governments each pitch in a dollar for every dollar contributed to a project by Mexican migrants outside the country.
Recognizing the billions of dollars that expatriate Mexicans send home each year to their families, the Mexican authorities created the matching fund arrangement in 2002 to channel some of that money to public works. In 2006, more than 1,000 Mexican migrant groups contributed close to $20 million to community improvement projects in 845 rural and urban locations, according to Martha Esquivel of Mexico's Department of Social Development.
Rivera hopes his efforts will encourage more migrants to get involved with their hometowns in Mexico and work to fix the problems that forced them to leave home in the first place.
But some observers criticize the matching-fund program, saying it's the responsibility of the Mexican government to build clean water systems and to provide schools, ambulances and other infrastructure, not the duty of Mexicans who left home due to a lack of opportunity.
After years of being all but ignored by their government, however, "the Three for One begins to signal to remittance senders that they're going to get some respect," said Campoamor.
She is an advocate of building links between immigrants in the United States and their home countries, in the way that hometown associations do. But her organization has opted to channel its funds specifically into initiatives that create jobs in Latin American countries.
Creating jobs
In the village of Tamaula, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, Pedro Laguna hopes that expanding his five-family goat-farming cooperative with the grant from Hispanics in Philanthropy can help stanch the flow of young people to the United States.
"I have nine kids in the United States, three daughters and six sons, but I have very little communication with them," said the 60-year-old father of 13 in a telephone interview. "I don't want to lose my children. We want to invest in our community so we have work here where we live."
An agronomist is advising the cooperative on getting the goats to produce milk year-round, instead of seasonally. With more milk, the farmers can make more cheese and the sweet, caramelized dulce de leche known as cajeta, both of which sell well in Irapuato, the nearest city.
Laguna plans to pass on his cheese-making expertise to a group of women in another village who were left behind by husbands who migrated north, and to a youth group, the children of immigrants. Most urgently, he is working to persuade his 16-year-old daughter, his youngest child, to stay on the farm.
"At first she wanted to follow her brothers and sisters north, but I've been trying to convince her that going to the United States is not easy, and returning is less so," he said. "Little by little, she's thinking more about staying in school and training to make cheese. And she's realizing that she can sell her little goats to earn some money. When there are animals at home, there's work. And when there's work, there's money."
Hispanics in Philanthropy plans to make three-year grants to half a dozen more projects in Mexico this spring and to begin similar efforts in Nicaragua and Guatemala. The group is already working in the Dominican Republic and Argentina.
Fair Trade
On a larger scale, and with a somewhat different approach, Oakland-based TransFair USA is promoting fair trade coffee, tea, chocolate, bananas, rice and other agricultural products from Mexico and many other developing countries.
"Our goal is to give people the tools and the market access to lift themselves out of poverty. When you do that, people don't want to leave home," said TransFair founder and president Paul Rice.
Rice, who lived for 11 years in Nicaragua and is married to a Nicaraguan, said he has seen up close in his own family the intense pressures that push people to leave home and seek their fortunes in el norte.
In the early 1990s, after years of working on traditional development projects, Rice realized farmers needed not only access to capital and technical assistance, but better access to markets in order to flourish.
He helped a group of peasant coffee farmers sell their beans in Europe, where a fledgling fair trade market was taking hold, allowing small producers to earn a premium price by eliminating the middleman. Soon Rice was promoting the idea in the United States to businesses like Starbucks and Wal-Mart, eager to burnish their image as responsible corporations. His group is still the only fair trade certifying body in this country.
"Globalization has led to more trade and economic growth," he said. "But growth for whom? The benefits are not trickling down to the poor. Fair trade tries to make free trade work for the poor. ... It's not free trade if you depend on the guy who drives up in his pickup and says, 'The price is 10 cents a pound, take it or leave it.' "
Today, the coffee cooperative Rice started can guarantee $1.51 a pound to its 2,300 member families and still has money left over to invest in community projects.
"In Nicaragua, migration has been growing steadily over the past decade because of the lack of jobs," said Merling Preza, the cooperative's manager, speaking from the northern town of Estelí. "It's leading to family disintegration and a loss of values, and that means more social instability. But the small farmers who have organized into cooperatives and sell on the fair trade market don't need to leave their communities to survive."
All these efforts to create economic stability in Mexico and Central America are laudable, say observers, but by themselves they can only help a small fraction of the population. Wealth and complexity in a nation's economy are created by manufacturing goods, not selling raw materials, and above all, by investing in the country's human capital, said Guarnizo, the UC Davis professor.
"It's a political decision," he said. "Think of the case of India with high tech. How did they do it? Was it because Indians are very clever? No. It's because the state made a decision to put money into education. It took over 40 years, but they have that now."
But Mexico, where the economy does not currently create enough jobs for the population, has come to rely on the remittances sent home by migrant workers, said another immigration analyst, Jeff Faux, the director of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
"The deal works for the elites on both sides of the border. The U.S. business community gets cheap labor and suppresses wages, and the Mexican elite gets rid of people who are discontented and restless," he said. "But you can't develop a country by exporting your most ambitious people."
Faux has proposed that the United States give Mexico a push to develop its economy through investing in its own people. In an article in this month's American Prospect magazine, Faux suggests that the United States offer to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement to promote economic growth and a more equal distribution of wealth in Mexico. That, he said, could produce a real solution to illegal immigration.
In the meantime, groups in the Bay Area and beyond are determined to keep chipping away at the poverty that causes people to migrate. Building economic sustainability in Mexico and its poorer neighbors, they say, will do a lot more to prevent illegal immigration than putting up border fences or even offering guest worker visas.
In Tamaula, Pedro Laguna has built new roofs on his goat pens and when spring comes he'll be buying more animals. He hopes not only to keep his teenage daughter around, but to encourage some of his other children to return.
"I have one daughter in Georgia who hasn't worked for a year. She's going to come home and I'll have a job for her," he said. "I hope that in not too long, I'll be able to offer work to all of them."
Resources
Hispanics in Philanthropy:
www.hiponline.org, (415) 837-0427
TransFair USA:
www.transfairusa.org, (510) 663-5260
Three for One Program:
www.ime.gob.mx, (213) 487-6577
Hispanics in Philanthropy: www.hiponline.org, (415) 837-0427
TransFair USA, www.transfairusa.org, (510) 663-5260
Three for One Program: www.ime.gob.mx, (213) 487-6577
E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/07/MN16U0MHQ.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
2.06.2009
An Education in Border Injustice
Sojourners
An Education in Border Injustice
by Helene Slessarev-Jamir 02-06-2009
As I sat in the federal court room in Tucson witnessing the sentencing of over 60 people who had been caught crossing the border between the U.S. and Mexico without proper documents, I thought about the Mathew 25:31 text in which Jesus speaks of the judgment of the nations based on their care of “one of the least of these” Before us were almost 60 men and four women, all but one were young, with dark complexions that resembled those of the indigenous people I had encountered in southern Mexico the summer before. These beautiful, handsome people were being treated as disposable people – neither the Mexican nor the U.S. government wanted them. Here they stood with chains around their wrists and ankles after having risked their very lives in a desperate attempt to cross the border in search of a livelihood.
I had brought seven of my seminary students to the border just south of Tucson for a week-long experiential class on immigration. I live in the Los Angeles region c one of the epicenters of new immigration to the U.S. – attend a predominantly immigrant church, have been writing on immigration related issues for some years, and had been active in the 2006 campaign for comprehensive immigration reform. But none of that quite prepared me for what we witnessed at the border. It was here that I truly confronted the atrocities of our current enforcement system that has transformed the border with our neighbor Mexico into a militarized zone. Beginning in 1994, one year after President Clinton signed NAFTA, the U.S. Border Patrol implemented what is known as Operation Gatekeeper, which sought to fortify border crossings in the more urbanized regions of the U.S.-Mexico border, thereby forcing migrants to cross in the desert where the border patrol asserted it could more easily apprehend them. The result has been to force migrants into ever more remote regions of the desert, resulting in over 1,200 deaths in the Arizona desert alone.
We went out into that desert with Humane Borders, one of several humanitarian organizations actively seeking to save migrant lives by placing water stations in the desert. These volunteers and others seek to live out Isaiah 49:10:
They will neither hunger nor thirst, nor will the desert heat or the sun beat upon them. He who has compassion on them will guide them and lead them beside springs of water.
While in the desert we visited a small makeshift shrine erected at the spot where a woman had died. The barrel was dilapidated, perforated with bullet holes, yet inside were a set of praying hands with some artificial flowers and broken rosary beads scattered on the desert floor around it. We stopped, held hands, and prayed together not knowing how many others were facing death somewhere in that same desert at that very moment.
Just walking short distances in the desert gave a sense of its vastness, where a person could easily become disoriented and lost unless one followed some distinct markers. Many of the migrants coming from southern Mexico believe that it is a short walk from the border to Phoenix, not realizing that it is actually 178 miles.
A conversation with a Latino pastor whose church overlooks the border on the U.S. side gave us an intimate look at the migrants’ point of view. He told us that many Mexicans want to cross for only short periods of time and then go home, while people from Central America have often paid three times as much to reach the border and therefore want to stay in the U.S. longer. He described how a group of women, wet and hurting, came to his church. They had been hiding in a tunnel under the border for three days after their coyote abandoned them. Saying, “There is a difference between moral law and legal law,” he gave them food and clothes even though it is illegal to assist someone crossing without documents. He knows of many immigrants who dream of going home, but they have sold everything to raise the money to come to the U.S. and so have nothing left to go home to.
We also crossed into Mexico twice to visit with both American and Mexican people of faith who are aiding migrants after they have been deported. No More Deaths, an all-volunteer organization, has documented daily human rights abuses by the border patrol and ICE by conducting interviews with hundreds of deportees arriving at their aid stations. We learned that despite millions of dollars having been pumped into the Border Patrol during the Bush administration, there has been absolutely no oversight of their conduct either by the Department of Homeland Security or Congress. We finally found a sign of joy after reaching a small lunchroom run by a group of Catholic nuns just a short walk from the border at Mariposa. Although still shaken by their days in custody, the people who greeted us there seemed more relaxed and relieved to once again be safely within Mexico. Here they could regroup and decide their next steps
While we walked across the border, there were lines of trailer trucks lined up waiting to cross into Mexico. We must realize that traffic runs in both directions – today the U.S. is importing guns into Mexico that have fueled the violent drug wars that are now raging through that country. We also heard stories of coyotes who traffic both humans and drugs, forcing migrants to carry drugs into the U.S. on their backs; if caught, the courier will face years in U.S. prison.
By week’s end our hearts wept at all we had heard and seen. I can no longer support so-called legislative compromises that will countenance the continued militarization of the U.S. border with its neighbors. Those of us in the immigrant rights community must insist on the creation of lawful avenues of entry that will allow people who wish to work in the U.S. to do so legally, without them being tied to one particular employer as is generally the case with guest worker programs. We must demand that the U.S. uphold international human rights standards in its treatment of migrants. Si se peude!
An Education in Border Injustice
by Helene Slessarev-Jamir 02-06-2009
As I sat in the federal court room in Tucson witnessing the sentencing of over 60 people who had been caught crossing the border between the U.S. and Mexico without proper documents, I thought about the Mathew 25:31 text in which Jesus speaks of the judgment of the nations based on their care of “one of the least of these” Before us were almost 60 men and four women, all but one were young, with dark complexions that resembled those of the indigenous people I had encountered in southern Mexico the summer before. These beautiful, handsome people were being treated as disposable people – neither the Mexican nor the U.S. government wanted them. Here they stood with chains around their wrists and ankles after having risked their very lives in a desperate attempt to cross the border in search of a livelihood.
I had brought seven of my seminary students to the border just south of Tucson for a week-long experiential class on immigration. I live in the Los Angeles region c one of the epicenters of new immigration to the U.S. – attend a predominantly immigrant church, have been writing on immigration related issues for some years, and had been active in the 2006 campaign for comprehensive immigration reform. But none of that quite prepared me for what we witnessed at the border. It was here that I truly confronted the atrocities of our current enforcement system that has transformed the border with our neighbor Mexico into a militarized zone. Beginning in 1994, one year after President Clinton signed NAFTA, the U.S. Border Patrol implemented what is known as Operation Gatekeeper, which sought to fortify border crossings in the more urbanized regions of the U.S.-Mexico border, thereby forcing migrants to cross in the desert where the border patrol asserted it could more easily apprehend them. The result has been to force migrants into ever more remote regions of the desert, resulting in over 1,200 deaths in the Arizona desert alone.
We went out into that desert with Humane Borders, one of several humanitarian organizations actively seeking to save migrant lives by placing water stations in the desert. These volunteers and others seek to live out Isaiah 49:10:
They will neither hunger nor thirst, nor will the desert heat or the sun beat upon them. He who has compassion on them will guide them and lead them beside springs of water.
While in the desert we visited a small makeshift shrine erected at the spot where a woman had died. The barrel was dilapidated, perforated with bullet holes, yet inside were a set of praying hands with some artificial flowers and broken rosary beads scattered on the desert floor around it. We stopped, held hands, and prayed together not knowing how many others were facing death somewhere in that same desert at that very moment.
Just walking short distances in the desert gave a sense of its vastness, where a person could easily become disoriented and lost unless one followed some distinct markers. Many of the migrants coming from southern Mexico believe that it is a short walk from the border to Phoenix, not realizing that it is actually 178 miles.
A conversation with a Latino pastor whose church overlooks the border on the U.S. side gave us an intimate look at the migrants’ point of view. He told us that many Mexicans want to cross for only short periods of time and then go home, while people from Central America have often paid three times as much to reach the border and therefore want to stay in the U.S. longer. He described how a group of women, wet and hurting, came to his church. They had been hiding in a tunnel under the border for three days after their coyote abandoned them. Saying, “There is a difference between moral law and legal law,” he gave them food and clothes even though it is illegal to assist someone crossing without documents. He knows of many immigrants who dream of going home, but they have sold everything to raise the money to come to the U.S. and so have nothing left to go home to.
We also crossed into Mexico twice to visit with both American and Mexican people of faith who are aiding migrants after they have been deported. No More Deaths, an all-volunteer organization, has documented daily human rights abuses by the border patrol and ICE by conducting interviews with hundreds of deportees arriving at their aid stations. We learned that despite millions of dollars having been pumped into the Border Patrol during the Bush administration, there has been absolutely no oversight of their conduct either by the Department of Homeland Security or Congress. We finally found a sign of joy after reaching a small lunchroom run by a group of Catholic nuns just a short walk from the border at Mariposa. Although still shaken by their days in custody, the people who greeted us there seemed more relaxed and relieved to once again be safely within Mexico. Here they could regroup and decide their next steps
While we walked across the border, there were lines of trailer trucks lined up waiting to cross into Mexico. We must realize that traffic runs in both directions – today the U.S. is importing guns into Mexico that have fueled the violent drug wars that are now raging through that country. We also heard stories of coyotes who traffic both humans and drugs, forcing migrants to carry drugs into the U.S. on their backs; if caught, the courier will face years in U.S. prison.
By week’s end our hearts wept at all we had heard and seen. I can no longer support so-called legislative compromises that will countenance the continued militarization of the U.S. border with its neighbors. Those of us in the immigrant rights community must insist on the creation of lawful avenues of entry that will allow people who wish to work in the U.S. to do so legally, without them being tied to one particular employer as is generally the case with guest worker programs. We must demand that the U.S. uphold international human rights standards in its treatment of migrants. Si se peude!
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