Showing posts tagged immigration
thenoobyorker: political-linguaphile: The latest issue of TIME featuring Jose Antonio Vargas, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who over a year ago wrote an essay for The New York Times “coming out” as an undocumented immigrant. Vargas relates:  I told of my journey of being sent from the Philippines to America at age 12 without knowing I didn’t have the right papers; graduating from college and working as a successful journalist; and relying on a support network of American citizens (my high school principal and high school superintendent among them) to get me through. But mine is just one story. So with the help of friends and supporters, I founded a campaign called Define American, to document the lives of the undocumented and harness the support of our allies around this very controversial and misunderstood issue.   There are an estimated 11.5 million people like me in this country, human beings with stories as varied as America itself, yet lacking a legal claim to exist here. It’s an issue that touches people of all ethnicities and backgrounds: Latinos and Asians, blacks and whites. (And, yes, undocumented immigrants come from all sorts of countries like Israel, Nigeria and Germany.) It’s an issue that goes beyond election-year politics and transcends the limitations of our broken immigration system and the policies being written to address them. Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/06/14/inside-the-world-of-the-illegal-immigrant/#ixzz1xnEd117S I really recommend reading Vargas’ essay. It really lays out how not every immigrant has a choice. Mr. Vargas was brought here as a child, not knowing he didn’t have the proper documentation. A lot of children are brought into this country this way. They grow up just as American as anyone born here, and in my opinion, really are just as American as anyone born here. Great job TIME.

thenoobyorker:

political-linguaphile:

The latest issue of TIME featuring Jose Antonio Vargas, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who over a year ago wrote an essay for The New York Times “coming out” as an undocumented immigrant. Vargas relates: 

I told of my journey of being sent from the Philippines to America at age 12 without knowing I didn’t have the right papers; graduating from college and working as a successful journalist; and relying on a support network of American citizens (my high school principal and high school superintendent among them) to get me through. But mine is just one story. So with the help of friends and supporters, I founded a campaign called Define American, to document the lives of the undocumented and harness the support of our allies around this very controversial and misunderstood issue.  

There are an estimated 11.5 million people like me in this country, human beings with stories as varied as America itself, yet lacking a legal claim to exist here. It’s an issue that touches people of all ethnicities and backgrounds: Latinos and Asians, blacks and whites. (And, yes, undocumented immigrants come from all sorts of countries like Israel, Nigeria and Germany.) It’s an issue that goes beyond election-year politics and transcends the limitations of our broken immigration system and the policies being written to address them.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/06/14/inside-the-world-of-the-illegal-immigrant/#ixzz1xnEd117S

I really recommend reading Vargas’ essay. It really lays out how not every immigrant has a choice. Mr. Vargas was brought here as a child, not knowing he didn’t have the proper documentation. A lot of children are brought into this country this way. They grow up just as American as anyone born here, and in my opinion, really are just as American as anyone born here.

Great job TIME.

(Reblogged from thenoobyorker)

"In 2009," Angus and Butler continue, "the U.S. military used 5.7 trillion gallons of oil, just under 16 million gallons a day. Its operations produced an estimated 73 million tons of greenhouse gases," making it the biggest polluter - and the largest petroleum gobbler - in the universe. In fact, in just four years, 2003-2007, the Iraq War resulted in 141 metric tons of CO2 emissions - the equivalent of 25 million cars. "Those who claim [that] slowing population growth," Angus and Butler write, "will stop or slow environmental destruction are ignoring these real and immediate threats to life ... Corporations and armies aren't polluting the world and destroying ecosystems because there are too many people, and they won't stop if the birth rate is reduced. If Afghan women have fewer babies, the US military won't stop firing shells made of depleted uranium into their villages. Nor will military bases in Afghanistan stop dumping toxic wastes into open burn pits."

climateadaptation:

Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environment…

(Reblogged from climateadaptation)
kylegreggy: inothernews: The Colbert Report. Re: this. “Many legal Hispanic workers are fleeing the state because their family and friends don’t have the proper papers and they fear they will be jailed” in response to the Alabama Workers Immigration Law. The region is losing vital workers and the political agenda is backfiring into the already volatile situation of the US economy. The targeted Hispanic population is being further alienated and many are convinced that the law must be repealed to provide a viable economic future and improved setting for social justice. View high resolution

kylegreggy:

inothernews:

The Colbert Report.

Re: this.

“Many legal Hispanic workers are fleeing the state because their family and friends don’t have the proper papers and they fear they will be jailed” in response to the Alabama Workers Immigration Law. The region is losing vital workers and the political agenda is backfiring into the already volatile situation of the US economy. The targeted Hispanic population is being further alienated and many are convinced that the law must be repealed to provide a viable economic future and improved setting for social justice.

(Reblogged from brooklynmutt)
hushpoint: Abolish Immigration Prisons: Freedom of Movement for All View high resolution

hushpoint:

Abolish Immigration Prisons: Freedom of Movement for All

(Reblogged from hushpoint)
“
We very much regret that you were detained.

Philip H. Lynch, chief of the civil division in the U.S. attorney’s office in Seattle, in a letter to an Army veteran (and American citizen) who was detained for more than seven months by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on suspicions that he was an illegal immigrant. ICE has agreed to pay Rennison Vern Castillo $400,000 for the wrongful detention. (via officialssay)

“Whoops. Our bad. Sorry about that, bro.”

(Reblogged from jonathan-cunningham)

Angry Arizona, Again

turnabout:

Many states are doing urgent business: jobs, the economy, broken budgets. Arizona’s legislators are trying to give government new powers to strip away individual rights, to extend immigration enforcement into schools, public housing, hospitals and doctor’s offices.

Arizona made itself ground zero for a new nativism last year with a radical policing law that encouraged racial profiling and declared the mass expulsion of undocumented immigrants to be official state policy. This led to boycotts, slumping tourism and convention business, and lawsuits, including one by the Obama administration. Yet Arizona’s current legislative session is overstuffed with nativist bills, several of which passed through committee on Tuesday in an “omnibus” measure.

They include:

A bill to chop up the 14th Amendment to deny citizenship to children born in Arizona to undocumented mothers. A bill requiring hospitals to check every patient’s citizenship status, turning doctors and nurses into the immigration police. A bill to deny education to undocumented children by requiring proof of citizenship to enroll in any public or private school. A bill to criminalize driving by illegal immigrants, and to evict them from public housing. This will fix nothing, and do real harm.

my emphasis.

(Source: azspot)

(Reblogged from turnabout)
“
If you are ever going to stop this invasion, and it is an invasion, you have to quit rewarding people for breaking those laws,” said State Senator Russell Pearce, the Senate president, who is leading Arizona’s effort to try to make life so difficult for illegal immigrants that they stop coming, or leave.

New Anti-Immigration Bills in Arizona - NYTimes.com

Here again is yet another national MSM article talking about the fucked up white supremacist bullshit in Arizona that never once mentions where the proposed legislation is coming from—i.e. white supremacist organizations. This language—“invasion”? it is language of white supremacist nativist militias that have been around since the 1800s. invasion of cockroaches. The cockroaches come out at night and sneak in. This article also does not put Pearce in context—being supported economically by and have relationships with blatantly white supremacist organizations like the American Border Report. The interesting thing is that on a national front, these groups and politicians have been careful not to use language like this. To us use “polite” language coached in terms of “anti-terrorism” language that the government uses. Invasion rides that line—where it’s talking to other anti-latino white supremacists—while hiding behind anti-terrorism language. asserting this is an “invasion”—makes sense in the context of “oh, my god, the terrorists could slip right through and then we’ll have another 911!”—but it is a wink towards hate groups. The ones worried about “our way of life” —i.e. our white daughters fucking a spic and giving birth to anchor babies. i.e. our white children speaking spic language. i.e. our clean town covered in dirty cockroaches. i.e. dirty spics grabbing their cocks in front of our good pure ladies. i.e. white men not being in control of everything. I’m suprised at the blatant language he’s using. And I hope that everybody recognizes it for what it is. And sees that in pushing the boundaries like this of what language he’s using—he’s asserting a confidence that *people will support him anyway*. Because they’ve bought the kinder gentler message. 

(via radicallyhottoff)

Yes yes yes. Russell Pearce created Arizona’s brutal Tent City prison as a member of Joe Arapaio’s sheriff’s department. The first bill he introduced in the AZ House a decade ago would have required CPS workers to report suspected undocumented immigrants, even if that person was not being investigated. He has opposed undocumented persons having access to what he calls “public benefits” - things like ambulances, police and fire department protection, etc. He called for the reinstatement of “Operation Wetback,” which deported almost a million undocumented people and US citizens in the early 1950s. This man has been shopping SB 1309 (the bill that denies automatic citizenship to the children of undocumented parents) through multiple committees until he found one that would pass it. He introduced SB 1611, which takes his SB 1070 (yup, he authored that one too) one step further to deny children access to public education if they can’t provide a birth certificate. This man is scary as hell, and it ought to make your hair stand on end that a publication like the New York Times is quoting him as anything but a dangerous, racist demagogue. This isn’t new, and this isn’t Tea Party posturing. Russell Pearce has been treating immigrants in Arizona as a subhuman species to be exterminated for a very long time, and now he and other fully complicit lawmakers have the influence to make it so.

(via thetart)

It’s incredibly expensive to pay for people to crossover, by the way your government is in on this and those politicians make bank from this as well to the tune of $7,000 a head. The more difficult you make it for individuals to cross the border, the more expensive the fee’s. It’s a pseudo- drug war, declare unenforceable laws and watch profits soar. It’s a win-win for conservatives and their constituents.

(via thenoobyorker)

Emphasis on Luis’ comment above is mine. And since we just read Border Games, this was a big point of discussion in class today.

(Reblogged from thenoobyorker)

Policing borders: politics and the evasion of addressing the economic push and pull factors that drive supply/demand — or why border patrol is like DayQuil

Ultimately, it seems that border enforcement as we’re familiar with it today is akin to taking DayQuil for the flu… you might feel marginally better, but ultimately you’re just masking the symptoms and potentially making things even worse for yourself.

Ended my paper for my [In]Justice & [Dis]Order class this week (focusing on the policing of borders, and in particular, the US-Mexico border) with this. Border patrol: looks good, but is mostly useless.

Reading this now for my [In]Justice & [Dis]Order class. I’m also watching Sleep Dealer (Mexican science fiction film) right now for that same class. (It is thankfully in Spanish, and not dubbed.)

Reading this now for my [In]Justice & [Dis]Order class.

I’m also watching Sleep Dealer (Mexican science fiction film) right now for that same class. (It is thankfully in Spanish, and not dubbed.)

“
An undocumented Florida woman who helped her sister report domestic violence now faces an order of deportation from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even though her lawyers say she never should have been detected by ICE agents in the first place. The woman, Rita Cote, 25, is married to a U.S. citizen and has four children, all of them citizens. She has no criminal record. But when police arrived to respond to the domestic-violence call on Feb. 16, 2009, law enforcement instead took Cote into custody, detained her for a week and handed her over to ICE. Cote now faces deportation at any time to her native Honduras, which she fled as a child in 1998 to escape Hurricane Mitch and its aftermath. If deported, she could be separated from her husband and children for up to a decade.

Honduran Immigrant Faces Deportation After Helping Her Sister Report Domestic Violence

I can’t speak without slicing a mofo right now. 

(via radicallyhottoff)

this kind of consequence is routinely raised by both immigration and domestic violence advocates and is routinely dismissed as something that “would never happen” because of police discretion and the importance of encouraging victims of domestic violence to engage with law enforcement.

it happens. a lot. and it means that there’s yet another barrier for immigrant women experiencing domestic violence, even when they’re actively seeking help and protection.

what a great system we’ve constructed to support and encourage women. 

(via abbyjean)

(Reblogged from abbyjean)