Weekly Roundup – April 7th – 11th

Firestorm over false accusations

Dallas girl falsely accused Latino students of assaulting her after she posted a sign, “If you love our nation, stop illegal immigration.” One of the best commentaries on this very telling episode comes from the Canadian Free Press website which features a column by Bob Parks from Massachusetts, entitled “The Crime or the Cover Up.”

Immigrant activist groups nationwide are outraged that innocent students could have been rousted, based on the word of a lying, attention-starved, little white girl. Many of those against illegal immigration got caught up in the sensational nature of the story, only to share the eggs on their faces for believing a story they wanted to be true.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/2606

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gZ1nT1vVtsPjlF3OBXD7k6zJzmkQD8VUT0601

CBS’s Katie Couric Tries to Save her Job by Playing Nativist Card

It is widely rumored that CBS Nightly News, celebrity anchor, Katie Couric is on the verge of hitting the pavement due to tanking ratings for the news program. “Lay off Katie Couric! CBS is to blame Network used a celebrity ploy to boost ratings and it completely backfired” by Michael Ventre In a gambit straight from the Lou Dobbs school of journalism, Couric fed up anti-immigrant red meat in a piece entitled, “Illegal Immigrant Births - At Your Expense.” The piece gave no balance and failed to present a counter-point to the clear anti-immigrant slant of the piece.

What CBS News has done is incredibly irresponsible and we need to pressure the hell out of them. I've been told that pro-migrant organizations have started to turn the screws and ask the producers exactly what they were thinking – the producers have given little indication of what they were thinking, if anything at all.

PLEASE LET CBS KNOW THAT THIS KIND OF HACK REPORTING IS UNACCPETABLE AND UNPROFESSIONAL:

1. Post to the comments at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/07/eveningnews/main4000401.shtml
2. Send the show an email at even...@cbsnews.com> even...@cbsnews.com
3. Call the network at 212-975-3247

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24054407/

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/07/eveningnews/main4000401.shtml

Villaraigosa Finally Speaks out Against Workplace Raids by ICE

LA Mayor, Villaraigosa tells Homeland Security chief that agents should target criminal gang members and not legitimate businesses. The Mayor notes that by targeting legitimate businesses, ICE raids are having a detrimental effect on the economy. Not surprisingly, ICE has indicated that American Apparel Company, which has taken a very public pro-immigrant stance, is in the Fed’s cross-hairs. Nothing like payback for exercising your First Amendment rights, no doubt Chertoff and his ICE thugs would love to make an example of American Apparel for speaking out.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-raids10apr10,1,298889.story

Orwellian SAVE Act Still Live and Threatening Every American’s Civil Liberties

As previously mentioned, the Republican hate machine knows no boundaries when it comes to abridging civil liberties in the name of immigration control. For everyone who still gives a damn about that thing called the Constitution and the Bill of Rights here is a rundown of the worst aspects of the SAVE legislation.

Oppose HR 4088, "The Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement

Act of 2007" Bill, known as the SAVE Act. The SAVE Act is a cynical and politically motivated attack on immigrant families and a foolish burden on our fragile economy.

• It would require approximately six million employers to verify the work status of more than 130 million workers within four years. If passed, the SAVE Act would place a tremendous financial and regulatory burden on businesses and employees at a time when our economy is already fragile. This is a foolish proposal at a time when our economy is already fragile.

• The federal database that would be used to enforce the SAVE Act is known to have an unacceptably high error rate – nearly 10 percent! An independent study of the E-Verify/Basic Pilot program found that the ½ of 1 percent of employers that use the program often misuse it, and that the data base would need to be significantly improved before it can be expanded.

• This is a recipe for a full scale assault on worker protections and anti-discrimination laws. Nothing in this legislation addresses real world concerns that this new mandate would lead to employers firing workers involved in union organizing drives or would have the resources to ensure that they are not discriminating against Latinos or other immigrants applying for employment.

• It will represent an unprecedented intrusion into the lives of millions of United States workers, regardless of their status. If this law were in place now, the errors in the SSA database alone could result in 2.5 million people a year being misidentified as unauthorized for employment. Workers, including U.S. citizens, will get caught in this faulty system and lose their jobs. The "SAVE Act" contains no assurances that government databases will be accurate and updated, no privacy protections for the vast amounts of personal information to be handled by employers, and no recourse for workers who are wrongfully denied employment.

• It would make it easier for the government to put religious and humanitarian workers behind bars for so-called "alien smuggling." Humanitarian workers – like nuns, priests, volunteers – would be constantly forced to navigate this confusing legislation, or run the risk of arrest, fines and imprisonment.

HATE GROUPS CONTINUE TO GET TREATED AS MAINSTREAM BY MEDIA

Despite a well-documented history of hatred and racism, the media continues to treat the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) as a mainstream advocacy group. In this one week, the New York Times, the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times all quoted FAIR as if it were merely an immigration advocacy group. These outlets need to identify this group as a hate group, the way they identify the Aryan Nation or stop using them as sources.

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Another Nativist Pol Bites the Dust

Republican Nativist, Shelley Sekula Gibbs, lost in her bid to to reclaim Tom DeLay's old Congressional seat. Read the full report at the Dream Act Texas site. (http://dreamacttexas.blogspot.com/) While Sekula-Gibbs would have made an entertaining character in the general election, this loss shows once again that anti-immigrant cant will not work as a wedge issue to get you elected. How long before the Republicans wake up and realize that the rant and rave they see on Fox News and the so-called cable news shows simply will not carry the day for them. Too bad for everybody concerned, the Republican hate machine continues to stoke nativist hatred without any returns. Check out the Dream Act site for more details.


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Students Protest Border Patrol Recruitment

The Seattle Post Intelligencer is reporting that students at Seattle University organized a protest against the Border Patrol presence at a recruiting fair. According to the article:

The official position of students was that having the Border Patrol on campus could make trouble for students and SU staff who are in the country illegally.

"We feel their presence makes students and workers feel unsafe," said SU student Marianne Mork.

And so they chanted their way across campus with cardboard signs.

(http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/schoolzone/archives/136084.asp)
Kudos to the students for raising the torch in a hostile political climate. If you support the students' acitons check out the PI site and leave a positive comment.

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(Photos from the Post Intelligencer)

The Media Continues to Treat Hate Groups as Respectable Advocacy Groups

Two issues of note. San Francisco, which long ago declared itself a sanctuary city for immigrants, has taken the step of publicizing that undocumented immigrants need not fear the police and that social services will continue to be extended to all regardless of immigrant status. The measure is note-worthy as many local law enforcement agencies have become arms of the Federal immigration enforcement authorities. ICE is actively promoting so-called local law enforcement in the war of attrition against immigrant communities. Many of the media stories on San Francisco's move, had a decidedly derisive tone, as might be expected. The Los Angeles Times played the story fairly straight.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-welcome4apr04,1,7762391.story

The New York Times laid out the facts in detail and then they did something which is absolutely abhorrent. In search for a soundbite they turned to the hate group the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)..

“I guess it’s what you expect from San Francisco,” said Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington, which lobbies for stronger immigration enforcement. “But now, not only are they helping people break the law of the federal government, they are advertising it. I don’t know of any other city actually looking for illegal immigrants.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/us/06immig.html?ref=us
This is akin to asking a member of the Aryan Nations for a quote on the latest policy initiatives by Barack Obama. Why does the so-called respectable media continue to treat hate groups as respectable advocates? The answer is that in the present climate, where Nativist hate-speech is deemed to be mainstream opinion, such groups are merely reflecting the Republican paradigm: a paradigm of hate.

In case anyone doubts that FAIR and other nativist groups are really hate groups in league with racists, we will again recount that group's move from mainstream advocacy in the 80s to a full out hate group in the last 10 years.

Heidie Beirich exposes the racist strain that informs the "respected" advocates of anti-immigrant hysteria such as the organization Federation for American Immigration Reform ("FAIR") which is often quoted in mainstream media such as the New York Times or National Public Radio. Beirich dissects the tangle of neo-Nazis who populate seemingly mainstream anti-immigrant organizations.

At the center of the Tanton web is the nonprofit Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the most important organization fueling the backlash against immigration. Founded by Tanton in 1979, FAIR has long been marked by anti-Latino and anti-Catholic attitudes. It has mixed this bigotry with a fondness for eugenics, the idea of breeding better humans discredited by its Nazi associations. It has accepted $1.2 million from an infamous, racist eugenics foundation. It has employed officials in key positions who are also members of white supremacist groups. Recently, it has promoted racist conspiracy theories about Mexico's secret designs on the American Southwest and an alternative theory alleging secret plans to merge the United States, Mexico and Canada. Just last February, FAIR President Dan Stein sought "advice" from the leaders of a racist Belgian political party.

(Where Anti-Immigrant Zealots Like Lou Dobbs Get Their 'Facts' - http://www.alternet.org/story/70489/?page=entire)

FAIR, which has consistently been treated as a mainstream advocacy group is rife with eugenitist nuts:

Probably the best-known evidence of FAIR's extremism is its acceptance of funds from a notorious, New York City-based hate group, the Pioneer Fund. In the mid-1980s, when FAIR's budgets were still in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the group reached out to Pioneer Fund, which was established in 1937 to promote the racial stock of the original colonists, finance studies of race and intelligence, and foster policies of "racial betterment." (Pioneer has concentrated on studies meant to show that blacks are less intelligent than whites, but it has also backed nativist groups like ProjectUSA, run by former FAIR board member Craig Nelsen.)

Marginal extremist groups are identified as such in most media, however, such is not the case with FAIR and other anti-immigrant groups. The problem is that such groups hijack the seemingly legitimate fears of otherwise rational citizens for their racist agenda. While a portion of the U.S. population is racist many who have been duped into supporting organizations like FAIR do not realize the contribution to organizations that preach hatred.

Hiring Haters

In late 2006, FAIR hired as its western field representative, a key organizing position, a man named Joseph Turner. Turner was likely attractive to FAIR because he wrote what turned out to be a sort of model anti-illegal immigrant ordinance for the city of San Bernardino, Calif. Based on Turner's work, FAIR wrote a version of the law that is now promoted to many other cities. (The law almost certainly violates the Constitution, but that has not stopped many municipalities' interest.)

Turner made one of his more controversial remarks, amounting to a defense of white separatism. "I can make the argument that just because one believes in white separatism that that does not make them a racist," Turner wrote in 2005. "I can make the argument that someone who proclaims to be a white nationalist isn't necessarily a white supremacist. I don't think that standing up for your 'kind' or 'your race' makes you a bad person." The Southern Poverty Law Center has listed Save Our State as a hate group since it appeared in 2005.

Turner's predecessor in the FAIR organizing post, Rick Oltman, was cut from the same cloth. Oltman has been described as a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) in the publications of that hate group, which is directly descended from the segregationist White Citizens Councils and has described blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity."

The New York Times must be held accountable for relying on such suspect sources. Clearly, they cannot quote spokespeople from such hate groups without identifying them as such.

Links:

Life after an illegal immigrant is sent home

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004330685_mexicoana06m.html
lturnbull@seattletimes.com

San Francisco Reaches Out to Immigrants

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/us/06immig.html
http://www.nytimes.com/gst/emailus.html

---------------------

The Seattle Times published an excellent article on what happens to deportees in Mexico, "Life after an illegal immigrant is sent home," by Lornet Turnbull. Unfortunately, the Seattle Times also quoted the same spokesman from FAIR in response to an opposing soundbite. As we've stated, the media continues to treat racist hate groups as mere advocacy organizations. Either, they should stop using such sources or identify them for what they are: hate groups.

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ICE Using Unconstitutional and Illegal Means in Raids

In what has become a common practice, agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE") have again been accused of using unconstitutional and deceitful methods in carrying out raids. The raids are targetting so-called "immigration fugitives" which is an Orwellian method to demonize and target immigrants who fail to appear for their administrative hearings. Contrary to the dark overtones in the use of the term "fugitives," these people have not committed crimes. In fact a great many of them merely overstayed their visas, hardly a criminal offense. Nonetheless, ICE continues to target the most vulnerable in the immigrant communities using offensive tactics. According to Julia Preston, article in the April 4, 2008, New York Times:

Immigration agents systematically entered homes and made arrests without proper warrants during raids to round up immigration fugitives in New Jersey, according to a federal lawsuit filed Thursday.

The lawsuit, brought by lawyers at the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall Law School in Newark, will provide a constitutional test of law enforcement methods often used by immigration agents since May 2006 when they began operations across the country to track down and deport immigrants who had been ordered to leave by the courts.

The suit, against officials of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, on behalf of 10 plaintiffs, including two United States citizens, contends that teams of ICE agents used “deceit or, in some cases, raw force” to gain “unlawful entry.”

These tactics are not confined to a rogue unit in New Jersey, they are operating procedure throughout the country. Nonetheless, the New Jersey lawsuit may set a precedent for challenging ICE's unlawful actions.

The lawsuit claims that agents, sometimes misrepresenting themselves as local police officers hunting for criminals, entered homes where no fugitives being sought were present and detained residents without showing any legal cause. Immigration agents have broad authority to question foreigners about their immigration status, but they may not enter a home without either a warrant or consent.

The ICE raids are part of a wholesale policy of denying civil liberties and civil rights protections to undocumented workers. In essence, the raids are part and parcel of the war of attrition that nativists are pushing against Latinos and other vulnerable communities.

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Who Needs Immigrants? Apparently Some Republicans

The continuing saga of immigration as a Republican wedge issue has claimed another victim and this one is not an undocumented immigrant. As we reported yesterday, the Repubs are targeting a group of freshmen Democratic representatives with the issue of immigration. With ICE actively promoting local enforcement, farmers are finding it hard to find workers for their fields. As reported in today’s New York Times:

“Over the last couple of growing seasons, farmers have been feeling a tremendous amount of stress over the way this issue has been playing out,” said Gary Swann, governmental relations director for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau. “And if people think all we have to do is raise wages and hire local workers, they are simply mistaken.”

(Immigration Issues End a Pennsylvania Grower’s Season, By Paul Vitello, The New York Times, April 2, 2008).

“And if people think all we have to do is raise wages and hire local workers, they are simply mistaken.”

Accordingly, Keith Eckel, stalwart Republican and owner of a large tomato farm is foregoing planting this year.

For 35 years, Keith Eckel, 61, one of the largest tomato growers in the Northeast, had the workers and the timing down to a T: seven weeks, 120 men, 125 trailer loads of tomatoes picked, packed and shipped.

This year, however, the new politics of immigration — very much on the mind of many of Pennsylvania’s voters, even if overlooked by the presidential candidates campaigning in this state and around the nation — has put him out of business.

State, local and federal crackdowns on illegal immigration have broken his supply chain of laborers. Most of those were Hispanic men who had come every year for decades, and whose immigration status Mr. Eckel recorded with the documents they provided to him. He kept them all in the file cabinets at his neat farm office — the Migrant Seasonal Farm Worker Protection Act forms, the Labor Department’s I-9 forms, the H-2A agricultural visa privilege forms — though he knew that, for the most part, it was a charade.

“It’s a ludicrous system,” he said the other day, sitting behind his desk in a light brown windbreaker that matched the fallow hillside beyond his office window here, 10 miles north of Scranton. “If the national statistics are correct, 70 percent of the documents in those cabinets are fraudulent.”

For years Mr. Eckel went along. “But in the current political climate,” he said, “I just can’t take the risk of planting two million tomato plants and watching them rot in the field.”

A ludicrous system indeed, but one which encouraged generations of immigrants to come and work in the United States. It should come as no surprise that of the million or so migrant farm workers who work the fields every year, some choose to stay. To nativists it is perfectly acceptable to exploit these workers and then kick them in the teeth. The reality of immigration is far more complex than Lou Dobbs and other nativists would have us believe. A reasonable immigration policy would recognize that having invited generations of immigrants to come and work in the United States we cannot pretend that the consequences were unforeseen. It is only reasonable to treat people that we encouraged to come to this country in a humane manner.

Rhetoric versus Reality

Congressional Quarterly reports that the Republican Party is targeting freshman Congressional Democrats on the issue of immigration. (http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=news-000002694369) Many of these Democrats come from rural districts where the electorate tends to be conservative. As previously reported, the Repubs are trying to push pieces of legislation onto the floor of the House of Representatives in order to try to tag vulnerable Democrats as being soft on illegal immigration. The irony is that the CQ article ends by noting that one of the farmers in a targeted district is decrying the fact that he can't find enough workers to harvest his crops. This is consistent with the hypocrisy of the Republican strategy on immigration. On the one hand they want to force debate on the odious SAVE legislation which is all hammer, nothing but enforcement on immigration, but offers nothing in the way of mitigation for the undocumented workers currently in the United States. At the same time the same politicos who want to wage a war of attrition against these very same workers are up in arms to increase the number of agricultural workers allowed into the country to do the dirty work that American workers refuse to take.

Immigration belongs to the jurisdiction of Congress and the Executive Branch

What is equally striking is that so-called local enforcement measures are being pushed by the Immigration and Custom Enforcement ("ICE"). ICE is pushing local officials to become actively involved in immigration enforcement. While nativists applaud these "local efforts" they also decry the fact that the lack of farm workers and the fact that the states have too much power in processing the inflow of immigrant labor. Conservative pundit, Paul Weyrich, states, "That said, all visas should be run through the Federal Government, not through individual states, because immigration belongs to the jurisdiction of Congress and the Executive Branch." "The Farm Worker Shortage, Immigration and a Probable Solution" By Paul Weyrich, (Wednesday, February 13, 2008). This all results from a shortage of farm labor:

The Bush Administration declared that it offered the proposal because Congress failed to pass the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007. The proposal would allow the Administration to address a shortage of legal farm workers. The Department of Labor (DOL) estimates that about 75,000 foreign workers participated in the H-2A visa program last year, while somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 undocumented laborers worked illegally on American farms. I suspect the numbers for the latter group are much higher than those DOL cites.

(Weyrich) Indeed, the Department of Labor notes that that the country requires close to a million farm workers a year. The overwhelming number of these workers are undocumented and any real enforcement against these workers would meet with resistance from the agro-industrial producers who are a bedrock of the Republican Party. The rank hypocrisy in these policies should provide some cover for Democrats who want to push back on the immigration issue. As eristic ragemail has previously argued, a principled stand on immigration, one which addresses all facets of the issue and takes a humanitarian approach to undocumented workers living in this country, is not the wedge issue that Republicans like to trumpet. One strategy may well be to hold up H-2A visas in exchange for some reason on that small part of the Republican Party that doesn't make its living on stoking hatred. This country depends greatly on undocumented workers and to treat them like criminals is not only wrong-headed, it is morally repugnant.

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