From True Blue Liberal
By Walter Brasch

The “star” of the Olympics may not be multiple medalists but the Great Wall of China. Every TV network covering the Olympics took the world to see the Wall. It seemed as if almost every newspaper and magazine reporter also visited the Great Wall.

But, the Great Wall, which was built and rebuilt many times over its 22 century history, eventually was a failure. Although formidable, and one of the world’s greatest engineering feats, the wall by the 16th century could no longer protect China from neighboring armies.

The Maginot Line, which France thought could protect it from Germany and Italy in the decade leading up to World War II, was largely a failure.

The Berlin Wall, at first barbed wire and then concrete, was built not to keep others out but East Germans in. But, there were more than 5,000 escapes during its 28 year history before the wall finally came down in 1989.

As we now know, poorly-constructed levees in New Orleans didn’t keep the flood waters of Katrina from destroying the city. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Seattle PI
By Yvonne Abraham

Remember that huge raid in New Bedford last year?

Federal officials arrested more than 300 illegal immigrant workers at the Michael Bianco Inc. factory, a waterfront plant that sewed backpacks for the military.

U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan said conditions inside the factory were like a 19th-century sweatshop: workers fined for being minutes late or for talking during work hours. Double shifts with no overtime. More fines for spending too long in the bathrooms, where there was little toilet paper.

Nobody should endure such Third World conditions. And particularly not in the service of a U.S. military contract – vital, taxpayer-funded work.

The Defense Department had a monitor at Bianco. Day after day, quality assurance officer Carmelo Kercado was surrounded by the immigrant workers and the supervisors who exploited them. And yet, amazingly, he was ignorant of all of it, according to a spokesman at the Defense Contract Management Agency.

All he knew was, the backpacks were getting done.

Desperate to keep the company’s jobs in New Bedford after Bianco’s tens of millions of dollars in military contracts were canceled, local officials brought in Missouri-based Eagle Industries to take over the operation.

Now there’s trouble at Eagle. Some of the 350 workers there say conditions at the plant are still bad, and they’re trying to unionize.

Read more No Defense

From True Blue Liberal
By Stephen Lendman

The 2002 Homeland Security Act established its largest investigative and enforcement arm in 2003: the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) created “as a law enforcement agency for the post-9/11 era, to integrate enforcement authorities against criminal and terrorist activities, including the fights against human trafficking and smuggling, violent transnational gangs and sexual predators on children” - “criminal” and “terrorist” threats to the nation.

Muslims are its principal targets. So are Latino immigrants, forced to seek work here because of NAFTA’s devastating effect on their lives and well-being. Turning logic, fairness and justice on its head in the current climate of fear, ICE calls them (and Muslims) “people….support(ing) terrorism and other criminal activities….against the United States” - 276,912 so-called “illegal aliens” removed from the country in FY2007 to justify its burgeoning budget to “keep America safe.”

ICE deters Latinos at the border and targets them at work sites and homes with $4.8 billion of DHS’ current FY 2008 $64.9 billion budget. Increasing to $5.4 billion in DHS’ FY 2009 $66.3 billion request.

Below is how some of the money was spent in July 2008 alone:

– on July 28, ICE arrested 13 Guatemalan and Mexican nationals in North Little Rock, Arkansas;

– on July 23, it seized 58 Mexican nationals in northern Ohio;

– on July 22, it reported 81 foreign national arrests in San Diego - 43 “criminal aliens” and 38 gang members or their associates;

– on July 21, it reported a record number of “illegal alien” deportations from Arizona from October 2007 through June 2008 - 38,799; Read the rest of this entry »

From The NY Times
Editorial

A story from the upside-down world of immigration and labor:

A slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, develops an ugly reputation for abusing animals and workers. Reports of dirty, dangerous conditions at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant accumulate for years, told by workers, union organizers, immigrant advocates and government investigators. A videotape by an animal-rights group shows workers pulling the windpipes out of living cows. A woman with a deformed hand tells a reporter of cutting meat for 12 hours a day, six days a week, for wages that labor experts call the lowest in the industry. This year, federal investigators amass evidence of rampant illegal hiring at the plant, which has been called “a kosher ‘Jungle.’ ”

The conditions at the Agriprocessors plant cry out for the cautious and deliberative application of justice.

In May, the government swoops in and arrests … the workers, hundreds of them, for having false identity papers. The raid’s catch is so huge that the detainees are bused from little Postville to the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in Waterloo. The defendants, mostly immigrants from Guatemala, are not charged with the usual administrative violations, but with “aggravated identity theft,” a serious crime.

They are offered a deal: They can admit their guilt to lesser charges, waive their rights, including the right to a hearing before an immigration judge, spend five months in prison, then be deported. Or, they can spend six months or more in jail without bail while awaiting a trial date, face a minimum two-year prison sentence and be deported anyway.

Read more Jungle Again

From The Seattle Times
By Froma Harrop

Immigration is said to be a divisive issue, but it really isn’t. Large majorities of Americans favor legal immigration, and large majorities oppose illegal immigration.

But the failure to control the process has created a tiger that periodically pounces onto the national stage. John McCain and Barack Obama both have their positions on immigration — many similar, some different. And as always with this issue, the details are everything.

John McCain is forever linked to the sweeping immigration reform that went down in flames last year and which Obama also backed. It promised to beef up enforcement of immigration law and put 12 million illegal aliens on the path to citizenship. The fatal flaw in the “grand bargain” was not its two-pronged approach, but its inability to convince voters that the enforcement part would be respected. (They were right to be skeptical.)

McCain’s move to an enforcement-first stance thus better fits popular sentiment. A recent Rasmussen Reports poll finds American voters believing, by a 63 percent to 28 percent margin, that it’s more important to control the border than resolve the status of people here illegally.

Obama doesn’t back “enforcement first.” Like McCain, he does endorse two essential ingredients for applying the law: an electronic system to verify a job applicant’s right to work in the United States and stiffer penalties on employers who hire illegals. But our history with immigration reform is littered with last-minute sabotaging of enforcement mechanisms. Obama’s past support for giving driver’s licenses to illegal aliens does not build faith in his desire to seriously apply the law.

Read more Immigration

From The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild

In the lead up to the Iraq War, the Bush Administration gathered more than 100,000 immigration records.

The details remain murky on this effort, but it involved at least two programs: Operation Darkening Clouds, run by the FBI, and Operation Liberty Shield, which was run by the Department of Homeland Security.

There is not much information available on Operation Darkening Clouds.

In fact, the New York Civil Liberties Union sued the FBI on June 24 for improperly withholding information about it.

There is one reference to Operation Darkening Clouds in a Department of Homeland Security document that the NYCLU obtained after it was released to Yale law students in response to their Freedom of Information Act request.

That document, entitled “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services/Fraud Detection and National Security Unit Automated Systems,” mentions the two operations in the following paragraph:

“During the pre-invasion of Iraq, FDNS [Fraud Detection and National Security] personnel pulled together over 130,000 immigration records which were the cornerstone for Operation Darkening Clouds (FBI) and Operation Liberty Shield (DHS).”

Last year, the New York Civil Liberties Union submitted its own Freedom of Information Act seeking additional documents on Operation Darkening Clouds.

The FBI refused to cough any up.

Read more Immigrants

From AlterNet
By Joshua Holland

I’ve encountered a new argument in my travels, both in the comments here on AlterNet and around the internet. It’s perhaps best captured by the motto of the “Illegal Invasion News” blog: “IT’S NOT ‘IMMIGRATION’ AND THEY’RE NOT ‘IMMIGRANTS.’” (This claim is often articulated in that ALL CAPS style so popular with small children and lunatics who are off their meds.)

The word “immigrant” has nothing at all to do with legal status. It means, simply, to move from one place to another for the purpose of settling down. Papers, no papers — it’s all irrelevant to the act of migrating.

The claim can be dispatched easily enough with a little elementary etymology. The word “migration” first appears in the English language in reference to humans in 1611, some 37 years before the modern nation state, with its discrete borders, came into existence. The Latin root of the verb “to immigrate,” immigrare, predates that by more than a thousand years. Human migration is a phenomenon that dates back to before homo sapiens even existed — pre-modern humans migrated wily-nilly. So, clearly, the word “immigrant” has nothing whatsoever to do with one’s paperwork being in order; its roots predate the existence of contemporary legal systems.

An interesting question is why they bother making the argument at all? Surely, it’s not relevant to the larger issue.

Or so it seems. But it is relevant, in that it is a response to a major problem for real immigration hardliners: the United States is, indisputably, a nation of immigrants and our heterogeneity, contra the howls of many a right-winger, is a big part of what makes America what it is. You can gorge on Bratwursts in Michigan, drink way too much vodka and mingle with decked-out Russian gliteratti in Brighton Beach, still read local Deutsche Zeitungen in small towns in Minnesota, eat Ethiopian food with your hands in L.A., sing weepy Irish ballads over your Guinness in dozens of Boston bars, wander the docks as the Vietnamese fishermen come in for a Texas evening and get the best roast pork in Little Havana. And thank god for all of that — I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Read more Hardliners

From The Consortium News
By Richard L. Fricker

Democrats – divided into warring camps behind Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – might want to take a look at Oklahoma to see what the future could hold if their party fails to unite, letting right-wing evangelicals and neoconservatives have their way.

The Republican-dominated Oklahoma legislature is defining the frontier of xenophobic immigration laws, anti-Muslim bigotry, gay bashing and encouragement of gun-toting students – with Democratic legislators often too timid to resist.

Rep. Randy Terrill, Republican chairman of the Revenue and Taxation Committee, has emerged as a hero of the “protect our borders” crowd by authoring a law – known as HB1804 – that makes it a felony even to give an illegal immigrant a ride.

You also can’t provide education, healthcare and many other services to undocumented immigrants, including infants. And, police are required to check the immigration status of anyone “suspected” of being in this country illegally.

If you thought such a draconian measure might face stiff opposition – or at least a drawn-out political battle – you’d be wrong. The bill sailed through the Oklahoma House, 88-9, with 35 of the 44 Democrats joining the Republicans, and then passed the Senate on a 41-6 vote with two-thirds of the Democrats lining up with Republicans.

After the law’s passage, its extreme – one might say unchristian – features prompted virtual declarations of civil disobedience from the Southern Baptist Convention and the Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches, which announced they would not curtail aid to anyone.

Read more Oklahoma

From AlterNet
By Joshua Holland

Last week, hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, flanked by helicopters, a trail of SUVs and a convoy of buses, descended on the tiny town of Postville, Iowa. They set up a perimeter around the 60-acre kosher meat-processing plant operated by the global giant Agriprocessors, Inc. and conducted the largest workplace raid in U.S. history. Around 400 people were arrested — most from Mexico, Eastern Europe and Guatemala — representing 40 percent of the plant’s workers and 17 percent of the town’s population. Warrants for another 300 were issued.

Some would call it a victory for law and order. But a closer look at the showy example of “getting tough on illegals” offers some insight into what immigration restrictionists are really asking for when they call for more immigration enforcement.

During a similar sweep last year, ICE generated some bad publicity when reporters found that a number of young children had been left unattended when their parents were arrested. So 56 of those arrested last week — mostly mothers of small kids — were released on “humanitarian grounds.” Nonetheless, a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of dozens of the Postville detainees “noted that a number of immigrant workers’ children have been stranded with baby sitters and other caretakers as a result of the raid.”

The suit charges that some of the detained workers are victims of crimes by Agriprocessors, Inc., which may entitle them to a visa, and accuses the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of arbitrary and indefinite detention and violating the workers’ constitutional rights.

According to the Associated Press, an attorney who interviewed some of those swept up in the raid said that the company itself “obtained false identification for immigrant workers.” But in the overwhelming majority of these raids — 98 percent, according to the Washington Post — the only people to pay any penalty are poor people trying to earn a substandard wage working in America’s growing unregulated economy.

Read more Immigration

From AlterNet
By Roberto Lovato

Justeen Mancha’s dream of becoming a psychologist was born of the tropical heat and exploitation that have shaped farmworker life around Reidsville, Georgia, for centuries. The wiry, freckle-faced 17-year-old high school junior has toiled in drought-dry onion fields to help her mother, Maria Christina Martinez. But early one September morning in 2006, Mancha’s dream was abruptly deferred.

From the living room of the battered trailer she and her mother call home, Mancha described what happened when she came out of the shower that morning. “My mother went out, and I was alone,” she said. “I was getting ready for school, getting dressed, when I heard this noise. I thought it was my mother coming back.” She went on in the Tex-Mex Spanish-inflected Georgia accent now heard throughout Dixie: “Some people were slamming car doors outside the trailer. I heard footsteps and then a loud boom and then somebody screaming, asking if we were ‘illegals,’ ‘Mexicans.’ These big men were standing in my living room holding guns. One man blocked my doorway. Another guy grabbed a gun on his side. I freaked out. ‘Oh, my God!’ I yelled.”

As more than twenty Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surrounded the trailer, said Mancha, agents inside interrogated her. They asked her where her mother was; they wanted to know if her mother was “Mexican” and whether she had “papers” or a green card. They told her they were looking for “illegals.”

After about five minutes of interrogation, the agents — who, according to the women’s lawyer, Mary Bauer of the Southern Poverty Law Center, showed no warrants and had neither probable cause nor consent to enter the home — simply left. They left in all likelihood because Mancha and her mother didn’t fit the profile of the workers at the nearby Crider poultry plant, who had been targeted by the raid in nearby Stilwell. They were the wrong kind of “Mexicans”; they were US citizens.

Read more Second-Class Citizens