Today conservative columnist Ruben Navarrette has a pretty simple message for Congress: it’s time to get out those calendars and set a date for immigration reform legislation.
He also goes one step further and suggests that immigration reform advocates send calendars to Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who stated earlier this year that he would have an immigration bill drafted by Labor Day.
Navarrette argues:
There’s a good chance that the Schumer bill is written and languishing in his desk drawer. After all, the senator had a very clear road map of where he wanted to go. In June, during a speech in Washington, Schumer laid out seven principles that he said would guide the legislation. Yet, five months later, no bill has been unveiled.
Hence, I think immigration reform activists should flood Schumer’s office with thousands of 2009 calendars, each one with a red circle around Labor Day.
Long Island Wins has launched a blogging campaign in memory of Marcelo Lucero, a 37 year old Ecuadorian immigrant who had been living in the United States for the past 16 years, murdered by a group of teenagers approximately one year ago. The campaign, which includes a petition for comprehensive immigration reform in Lucero’s honor, will culminate on Saturday with a candlelight vigil in his memory.
On the night of November 8, 2008, seven boys decided to go “beaner hopping” – the determined act of looking for and attacking Latinos – in Patchogue, NY. They chanced upon two victims – stealing one man’s hat earlier in the evening, and then later, stabbed Marcelo Lucero. According to the Associated Press:
Lucero, 37, was walking with a friend near the Patchogue train station at about midnight when they were confronted by the teenagers tooling around town allegedly looking for targets, a somewhat routine avocation for them, according to prosecutors.
His friend ran away, but prosecutors say the teens surrounded Lucero, who tried desperately to fight back, smacking one of his assailants with his belt.
A: Billions upon billions, if some Republicans get their way.
Fortunately, they didn’t get their way on the Census yesterday.
The Vitter-Bennett census amendment to the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill became a moot point yesterday afternoon when the Senate ended debate on the bill in a nail-biting procedural vote of 60 to 39, which comes as a relief to advocates who worked non-stop, through hubs like DontWreckTheCensus.org, to help sink the unconstitutional, impractical, and expensive measure.
Senators Vitter (R-LA) and Bennett (R-UT) were adamant that the 2010 Census ask about the citizenship and immigration status of respondents, a change which would have cost the government millions of dollars. All Republican Senators voted to keep debate going, save Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who was absent for the vote.
If the latest antics of Senators Vitter and Bennett are any indication, no cost is too high when it comes to stoking the immigration issue for an unquenchable hard-line base. Their threat to derail our nation’s decennial census had been panned by nearly every census expert and would have cost billions of taxpayer dollars. Senate Democrats deserve credit for standing up to the extreme wing of the Republican party that continues to bring up immigration as a wedge strategy in debate after debate– like a bad broken record.
When people talk in the abstract about undocumented immigrants – or, as some call them disdainfully, “illegals” – they don’t think about the fact that these “invisible people” are in fact present every minute of every day. The food we bring to our mouths has been picked or processed by their hands. They serve or cook our meals in restaurants, take care of our children, clean the offices where we work, or own businesses we patronize. They are our neighbors, friends, relatives…the list goes on.
Only in the world of Sheriff Joe Arpaio can you tell if someone is undocumented just by looking at him. The reality is that we’re all mixed together. I don’t like it when we talk about immigration reform “bringing people out of the shadows” because it makes them seem like criminals. They’re not in the shadows, they’re in plain sight–even though some people don’t want to see them or recognize their existence, and even though they have to live plagued by uncertainty from one day to the next.
Over and over again, we’ve been told that immigration reform is coming, and it’s beginning to seem like crying wolf. But our job now is to maintain the pressure on Washington to do something.
Check out the rest of the introduction–and the first entry in the series, “With Law Enforcement on Our Side”–at MaribelHastings.com.
Before Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional district, we reported that the nativist extremist Minuteman PAC had predicted third-party Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman was “positioned to win a landslide victory.”
The Minutemen — and the rest of the right-wing fringe groups that endorsed Hoffman over moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava — grew even more confident about their chances when Scozzafava dropped out of the race the weekend before the election.
As usual, however, immigration restrictionists turned out to be out of touch with reality. Not only was the election not a “landslide,” but Hoffman’s opponent, Bill Owens, beat Hoffman 49% to 45%. Owens is the first Democrat to hold the seat in over a century — a sign of just how badly the right wing has alienated mainstream Americans.
Immigration wasn’t a major issue in the campaign, but that didn’t stop the Minutemen from using it to try to scare up support for Hoffman. Unsurprisingly, the PAC’s claim that Hoffman was the “only candidate for Congress opposed to amnesty and government handouts for illegal aliens” failed to turn out voters — Hoffman did worse than expected even in the parts of the district considered his “base.”
This post is a weekly feature by Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger.
While many pundits and political analysts are musing about what Tuesday’s mixed bag election results mean for Obama administration, New America Media reports that “there’s another trend to watch; the surprising prominence of immigration politics.”
Even in states where other concerns “like small farms and forestry management” are far more immediate, “immigration has become a litmus test issue for the conservative movement,” and the expectation is, oddly, a “lockstep” goal toward opposing legalization. One has to wonder how the self-destructive choice to oppose immigration at any cost came about.
ColorLines‘ Leticia Miranda asks “What’s next?” now that the infamous Hutto immigration detention center, notorious for myriad human rights violations such as keeping children in prison-like conditions, is closing. Detainees are simply being moved to another detention center in Pennsylvania. So how will we know that substandard conditions and alleged sexual abuse will not be repeated? The problem is not location. The problem is that a class of people have been isolated and assigned lesser worth. making it easy to exploit them. Still, the closing of Hutto is an accomplishment for the ACLU and other activists that worked so hard to make it happen. It’s also a sign that our nation will not tolerate such conditions.
Another positive sign of progress is the reversal of what the Washington Monthly dubbed “a senseless ban” that prohibited HIV-positive individuals from migrating or traveling to the US. Author Steve Benen notes that progress in overturning the ban, which was imposed by the Reagan administration 22 years ago, began with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and then-Sen. Gordon H. Smith (R-OR) in 2008.
In negative news, the anti-immigration group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) have released a bizarrely antagonistic press release calling Rep. Gutierrez (D-IL) a “traitor,” as The Washington Independent reports. The full press release is here. In it, William Gheen, President of ALIPAC, happily warns that ALIPAC is “ready to organize and channel the backlash wave of anger that is coming into peaceful civic action” and for no apparent reason, employing a Dirty Harry quote beseeching an unnamed person to “Make my day, punk!” People like Gheen and Lou Dobbs are forever talking about a culture war and are obviously not interested in human beings.
