racial profiling, Obama's historic presidency may end up engendering hypocrisy

http://www.alternet.org/immigration/

Another 'Mission Accomplished' on the Border? By No Border Wall, Daily Kos Posted on July 29, 2009, Printed on August 8, 2009 http://www.alternet.org/story/141634/ In 2006, both the House and Senate passed Comprehensive Immigration Reform bills.  Each contained hundreds of miles of border wall, inserted as a bone to lure conservative support. The bills differed on a number of points, including the number of miles of wall to be built.  When a conference committee convened to craft a final bill they were unable to work out their differences, and immigration reform died in committee. From its ashes Congress pulled the one thing that they could agree on: 700 miles of border wall. The stated goal of the Secure Fence Act was to "achieve and maintain operational control over the entire international land and maritime borders of the United States. Nearly 3 years later, most of the border walls that it mandated are complete. Time to dust off the "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" banner and hang it on the border? Apparently not.  This month Senator Jim DeMint, whose home state of South Carolina is closer to Canada than Mexico, inserted an amendment into the Senates bill funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  It changes the Secure Fence Act to say that, "Fencing that does not effectively restrain pedestrian traffic (such as vehicle barriers and virtual fencing) may not be used to meet the 700-mile fence requirement. As of July 17, DHS claims to have completed 331 miles of "pedestrian fencing" and 302 miles of vehicle barriers.  If DeMints amendment makes it through the House/Senate Conference Committee and is signed into law, the border wall will suddenly be 369 miles short of its new mandate. DHS will probably replace many of the 302 miles of vehicle barriers with "pedestrian fence," inflicting tremendous environmental damage in the process. That leaves at least 67 miles of brand new border wall to be built in places that are currently unwalled.  With California, Arizona, and New Mexico largely walled off, those new border walls will most likely be built in Texas. So far, Congress has given the Department of Homeland Security $3.1 billion$ for border wall construction. The Army Corps of Engineers reported that between February and October of 2008 the cost of building walls increased by 88%, from an average of $3.5 million per mile to $7.5 million per mile. Some sections of border wall are particularly expensive: the levee-border wall combination in South Texas averaged $12 million per mile; in California, a 3.5 mile section that involved filling in canyons cost taxpayers$ $57 million.   If the Secure Fence Act succeeded in achieving "operational control" of the border, why should we spend no less than (and quite possibly a lot more than) $2,767,500,000.00$ to build 369 miles of new border wall? First and foremost, the border wall has failed to stop either immigrants or smugglers from entering the United States.   The majority enter through ports of entry, rather than crossing the desert on foot or the Rio Grande on an inner tube, so walls erected between the ports have no effect on them.  And according to the Border Patrol, even those who find the wall directly in their path are only slowed down by around 5 minutes.  As Border Patrol spokesperson Mike Scioli said, "The border fence is a speed bump in the desert." Professor Wayne Cornelius, with the University of California at San Diego, has spent more than a decade interviewing immigrants before and after they cross the border. His research has revealed that, even with border walls, "fewer than half of migrants who come to the border are apprehended, even once, by the Border Patrol. ... [T]he apprehension rate found in these studies varied from 24% to 47%. And of those who are caught, all but a tiny minority eventually get through –between 92 and 98 percent, depending on the community of origin. If migrants do not succeed on the first try, they almost certainly will succeed on the second or third try." Professor Cornelius goes on to conclude, the eventual success rate is virtually the same for migrants whose most recent crossing occurred before 1995, when the border was largely unfortified, and those crossing in the most recent period. In other words, the border enforcement build-up seems to have made no appreciable difference in terms of migrants’ ability to enter the United States clandestinely. So why would Senators, ranging from alleged fiscal conservatives such as Texas Republican John Cornyn to New York Democrat Charles Schumer, vote to spend nearly $3 billion$ on more border walls when those already erected do not work? Simply put, for those politicians who do not live beside the border, and do not count on the votes of those who do, the border wall is an abstraction.  The reality that the border wall has little or no impact on border crossers is irrelevant. The reality that more than 300 property owners have had their property condemned is irrelevant.  The reality that federally designated wilderness areas and wildlife refuges have been severely impacted is irrelevant. The Senators who voted for more border walls were voting for a symbol, nothing more. Even the Department of Homeland Security recognizes this fact.  After DeMints amendment was adopted, DHS spokesman Matt Chandler told the Wall Street Journal that it is, "designed to prevent real progress on immigration enforcement and [is] a reflection of the old administration's strategy: all show, no substance." Senator Schumer, who will be introducing a Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill around Labor Day, wrote in an op-ed, "I voted to require the Department of Homeland Security to construct significant fortifications to the border fence" as proof that he is, "serious about securing the border."  He did not bother to defend the effectiveness of the border wall, because that was not the point. The wall that he voted for is simply a symbol, meant to show that immigration reform and border enforcement can go arm in arm. Senator Schumer seems to think that by voting for more walls, and more than likely including border walls in his Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill, he can appease conservatives like Cornyn and gain their votes.   If so, he is deluded. No matter how much of the borderlands the bill sacrifices for the sake of empty gestures, immigration reform will not woo conservatives.  It is far more likely that Schumer will instead see a repeat of 2006, in which the only part of Comprehensive Immigration Reform that makes it to the Presidents desk is hundreds of miles of border wall. Our nation desperately needs immigration reform.  But as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said this past February, you cannot build a fence from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, and call that an immigration policy." It is a message that Congress sorely needs to hear. 2009 Daily Kos All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141634/

Obama Accused of Continuing Bush's Racial Profiling of Immigrants By Roberto Lovato, AlterNet Posted on July 29, 2009, Printed on August 8, 2009 http://www.alternet.org/story/141624/ Can a president who is, by any measure, far more forthright and lyrical than his predecessors about the pernicious effects of racism simultaneously promote and expand the racist policies of past administrations? This is the question vexing many in immigrants rights, Latino, civil rights and other circles following what feels to them like the contradictory messages about racial profiling coming from the Obama administration in recent weeks. On the one hand, many observers applauded Obama's July 15 speech to the NAACP convention and last week's statements about the circumstances surrounding the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Some found reassurance in statements like the one Obama made about the Gates incident last week: what we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. And that's just a fact. But when they heard the crushing sound of new reports documenting the effects of the Obama administration's treatment of immigrants, the president's Martin Luther King-like cadences on racial profiling rang hollow. A recently released report by Syracuse University concluded that immigration enforcement under the Obama administration is returning to the unusually high levels that were reached under President Bush. Critics say that thousands of immigrants -- and hundreds of U.S. citizens -- continue to be prosecuted, jailed and deported by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, in no small part because of racial profiling. That was the case of Brian Lyttle. In one of the hundreds of cases involving U.S. citizens, Lyttle, 31, a North Carolinian who has no Mexican ancestry, speaks no Spanish and suffers from mental illness, was deported by ICE to Mexico in April. Another damning report released last week by the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University analyzed the immigration raids of homes and workplaces conducted by ICE. According to the report, the raids, which have continued under the Obama administration, have resulted in the kinds of constitutional violations and routine racial profiling exemplified most clearly by the fact that "approximately 90 percent of the collateral arrest records reviewed, where ICE officers did not note any basis for seizing and questioning the individual, were of Latino men and women -- although Latinos represented only 66 percent of target arrests." Both citizens and non-citizens have been arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or what ICE calls collateral arrests" -- arrests of people who are with or near someone who was ICE's original target. Virtually all advocates agree that the legal and policy foundations for such practices were laid by both the Clinton and Bush administrations. The result has been the creation of what legal scholar Juliet Stumpf calls the "crimmigration system. Stumpf and others continue to decry an immigration system that, they believe, leads to the disproportionate profiling and incarceration (Latinos are now the largest group in federal prisons) of mostly poor immigrants in much the same way that harsh drug laws have led to the disproportionate profiling of blacks, Latinos and other poor people that help make the United States home to the world's most massive prison system. Coming from the Obama administration, one that created great expectations of change, the continuation and expansion of programs that  systematically violate rights are beginning to wear thin the goodwill of immigrant defenders like Maria Muentes of the New York-based Families for Freedom. "The nice speeches on race clash with the fact immigration enforcement is actually up under Obama; the levels of those incarcerated for immigration-related offenses look like they did during the Bush administration, said Muentes, whose organization advocates on behalf of detained immigrants. "Obama's speeches on racial profiling seem to leave out a lot of people. They exclude many immigrants, people for whom every aspect of their life is subject to racial profiling; people who are stopped while riding trains, people persecuted at work, people stopped while driving and all those families whose homes are terrorized by raids." Most disturbing to Muentes and other immigrants-rights and Latino activists, many of whom have been ardent Obama supporters, was a very low-key announcement made on a late Friday afternoon just days after the president's NAACP speech on racial profiling by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that the Obama administration would not just continue, but actually expand what advocates say is one of the fastest-growing, most troubling racial-profiling programs of the federal government, the 287(g) program. The initiative, which essentially deputizes state and local law enforcement officials to act as enforcers of federal immigration law, has been strongly criticized by the Government Accountability Office and research institutes such as Justice Strategies, which concluded that the Bush-era program is "driven more by racial animus than by concerns about public safety. Among the most demoralizing and irksome consequences of Obama administration's expansion of 287(g) is that the controversial program's greatest benefactor, Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, still has a federally sanctioned license to pursue and jail massive numbers of mostly Latino immigrants, as well as some citizens. Many law-enforcement officials have also denounced 287(g) because it diverts policing resources from more traditional law enforcement functions. In 2008, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, noting that while Arpaio's department was focused almost obsessively on locking up unauthorized immigrants, 48,000 violent felons were at large in Maricopa County, moved to block a grant that helped fund the sheriff's efforts. More recently, anger at Obama's expansion of 287(g) sparked an unprecedented and very direct denunciation by immigrant advocates from across the country, many of whom hadn't previously criticized the administration. A Statement Condemning Obama administration's Expansion of DHS's failed 287(g) Program was signed by more than 25 groups from across the country, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Immigration Law Center and the Detention Watch Network. Like many in the immigrants' rights community who have generally been supportive of the Obama administration, Jacqueline Esposito of the Detention Watch Network, one of the groups issuing the strongly worded statement, finds her organization caught in the conflict between the spirit and the letter of policies promoting racial profiling. "Detention Watch Network applauds the Obama administration's recent statements about racial profiling," said Esposito. "But we are concerned, because the Department of Homeland Security's expansion of the 287(g) program is a direct contravention of the president's statements. 287(g) has been widely criticized by government officials, immigrant-rights advocates and many others, for undermining community safety and for racial profiling." For her part, Muentes fears that when it comes to racial profiling, Obama's historic presidency may end up engendering hypocrisy of historic new proportions. "Some people thought that because he (Obama) is African American, it automatically means he will be more aware or critical of racial profiling against immigrants or others in the larger criminal justice system", she continued. "That might not be the case." Roberto Lovato, a frequent Nation contributor, is a New York-based writer with New America Media. © 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141624/ http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/

Border Wall Successfully Halting Immigration (of Wildlife) By Eoin O'Carroll, Christian Science Monitor Posted on August 5, 2009, Printed on August 8, 2009 http://www.alternet.org/story/141810/ Those who wish to secure America's borders from ocelots, pronghorn antelopes, gray wolves, and bighorn sheep scored a victory earlier this month, as an amendment to a Homeland Security bill passed by the House mandates an additional 369 miles of fence that will prevent these animals from crossing the border. The border wall, which was constructed after waiving three dozen federal environmental laws, is expected to be successful in reducing populations of these and other species, most of whom do not speak English or pay taxes. The science news site PhysOrg reports on a study for the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Biology, which found that Sonoran bighorn sheep populations north of the border rely on contact with those on the other side of the border to maintain genetic diversity. A 2007 report in Salon found that habitat fragmentation was also reducing populations of ocelots -- a rare species of wildcat that some argue could potentially steal jobs from Americans. Indeed, the only large mammal whose migration is largely unaffected by the border wall are H. sapiens, whose opposable thumbs and developed neocortex enable them to simply use ladders or dig tunnels under the fence. Last year, the Federation of American Scientists reported that the US Border Patrol had discovered 93 cross-border tunnels since 1990. What's more, almost half of illegal human immigrants avoided the border wall altogether by entering the US on a legal visa -- an option not available to members of other species. Still, by some measures, the border wall can be considered a success. Since its construction, there have been no reports of pronghorn antelopes enrolling in public schools, and the number of ocelots working in service industries appears to have been sharply reduced. Eoin O'Carroll is a blogger for The Christian Science Monitor. © 2009 Christian Science Monitor All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141810/

Now Presenting A Volatile Mexico -- From the People Who Brought You the Global Financial Meltdown By Jeff Faux, The Nation Posted on July 21, 2009, Printed on August 8, 2009 http://www.alternet.org/story/141452/ This past winter both the outgoing director of the CIA and a separate Pentagon report declared political instability in Mexico to be on a par with Pakistan and Iran as top-ranking threats to US national security. It was an exaggeration; Mexico is not yet a "failed state." On the other hand, it is certainly drifting in that direction. A vicious war among narco-trafficking cartels last year killed at least 6,000 people, including public officials, police and journalists. The country leads the world in kidnappings (Pakistan is second). And with the global crisis, the chronically anemic economy is hemorrhaging jobs, businesses and hope. Not surprisingly, voters turned against President Felipe Calderón's right-wing National Action Party (PAN) in the July 5 midterm elections. But the left-wing Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD)--which many believe was robbed of the presidency in the 2006 election--has ripped itself apart with factional infighting. So frustrated Mexicans gave their Congress back to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), whose decades of corrupt authoritarian rule were supposed to have permanently ended in 2000. At least, thought many voters, the PRI knows how to keep order. Mexicans are of course responsible for their own country. But geography has always forced them to play out their history in the shadow of their northern neighbor. "Poor Mexico," goes the saying. "So far from God, so close to the United States." Today, Mexico is a prime example of the socially destructive effects of the neoliberal economics promoted throughout the world by the US governing class. The North American Free Trade Agreement--proposed by Ronald Reagan, negotiated by George Bush I and pushed through Congress by Bill Clinton in 1993--is both symbol and substance of neoliberalism. It was sold to the citizens of the United States, Mexico and Canada with the promise that free trade in goods and money would transform Mexico into a booming middle-class economy, dramatically reducing illegal immigration and creating a vast market for US and, to a lesser extent, Canadian exports. Fifteen years later, Mexico is still unable to create enough jobs to employ its people. Out-migration has doubled, and on both sides of the US-Mexico border labor-market competition has kept wages down. At the top, income and wealth have ballooned. It is no accident that among NAFTA's prominent godfathers were former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (Democrat) and former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan (Republican), whose fingerprints are all over the current global financial disaster. I was an opponent of NAFTA. Still, I thought the best case for it was that efficiencies from economic integration could at least make US and Mexican businesses more internationally competitive. But even that argument turned out to be worth no more than a share of Bernie Madoff's hedge fund. Several years ago I gave a speech to a group of businesspeople in Mexico City. Those from the multinational banks and corporations thought NAFTA was a great success, but smaller Mexican businessmen saw it differently. You Americans, said one, promised that with your technology and our cheap labor, we'd be partners in competing with Asia. Then you opened up your markets to China and invested there instead. "Sure," he said. "We can make TV parts for half what it costs in the United States. But the Chinese can make them, and ship them, for a tenth. So instead of closing the gap between Mexico and the United States by raising wages, we have to narrow the gap between Mexico and China by lowering them." When I mentioned the conversation to a New York investment banker who had lobbied for NAFTA, he conceded that his side may have talked vaguely about partnership with Mexico. But he shrugged and added, "Things changed"--that is, profit opportunities in China dwarfed anything Mexico had to offer. The Wall Streeters had little interest in making Mexico more competitive. They also had little interest in making the United States more competitive. Their purpose was just the opposite: to disconnect themselves and their corporate partners from the fate of any particular country. The World Trade Organization, the opening of the US market to China and a parade of bilateral trade agreements followed in NAFTA's wake. In Mexico, the political and financial elite were willing collaborators. For example, NAFTA opened up Mexican banks to foreign ownership: political insiders who had bought the giant Banamex from the government for $3.2 billion and gotten the government to provide it with permanent subsidies then sold the firm, with the subsidies, to Citigroup for $12.5 billion. Today roughly 90 percent of the banking system is owned by US and other foreign investors, who do not have to recycle Mexicans' deposits, or the Mexican government's money, back into Mexico but can invest them anyplace in the world. The Banamex deal was negotiated by Rubin after he became Citigroup's $17 million-a-year executive committee chair. In the late 1980s, when he was at Goldman Sachs, Rubin had midwifed the privatization of Mexico's phone system to Carlos Slim, a politically connected Mexican businessman. Slim then used the monopoly profits from his high phone rates to invest all over the globe--including a substantial ownership stake in the New York Times. The latest Forbes rating says he's the world's third-richest man. Still, as long as the US economy was blowing dot-com and subprime bubbles, the neoliberal model seemed stable. US investors got Mexican bank deposits and cheaper labor on both sides of the border. Through out-migration to the States, Mexico's oligarchs got rid of frustrated workers who might otherwise have been politically troublesome. The economy also benefited from hard-currency remittances migrants sent back home. Another infusion of cash to the Mexican economy, unacknowledged in the official statistics, is the roughly $25 billion in illegal drug exports to the States. Today, with remittances, oil prices and tourism depressed, the narco trade is probably Mexico's largest single earner of hard currency. NAFTA and the neoliberal ideology it represents are certainly not the root causes of narco-trafficking. But they have been major factors in its recent monstrous growth. For starters, the trade agreement created a two-way overland superhighway for contraband; the Mexican drug lords use the dollars they have earned from their exports to import guns, aircraft and sophisticated military equipment from the United States to fight their territorial wars. By wiping out small Mexican farms that could not compete with heavily subsidized US agribusiness, NAFTA also expanded the pool of unemployed young people that provides the narco-traffickers with recruits. And banking integration under NAFTA made money laundering much easier. Perhaps most important, NAFTA has helped maintain the corrupt network of Mexican oligarchs. The 1988 presidential election--which the then-ruling PRI had to steal from the PRD to win--shocked the establishment on both sides of the border. By opening up Mexico to US money and influence, NAFTA was a way, as the US Trade Representative said to me at the time, "to keep the Mexican left out of power. Until the 1980s, Mexican drug (mostly marijuana) smuggling to the north was modest in scale and generally tolerated by successive PRI governments. Their message was: we don't care what you sell to the gringos, but no rough stuff here, keep it away from our kids and of course share a little of the profit under the table. But the US-backed neoliberals who took over the PRI in the 1980s had closer ties with the Mexican cartels. The brother and father of president and NAFTA champion Carlos Salinas--hailed in Washington as a good-government reformer--were widely accused of being connected to the drug business. In Salinas's first year in office his national police chief was found with $2.4 million in drug money in the trunk of his car. In the 1990s, as the geographically better-positioned Mexican cartels muscled out the Colombians as chief cocaine retailers to the US market, their profits and political influence grew. But so did the rivalry among them and their allied government factions for control of trade routes. Bullet-riddled bodies began showing up on the streets, making the public nervous. Seeking legitimacy after his 2006 election was tainted by charges of fraud, President Felipe Calderón declared war on the narco-traffickers. It was a popular gesture, but given that the police, the military and the legal system are heavily infiltrated by the gangs, it backfired. The narcos reacted with horrific violence--assassinations, beheadings and mutilations of police and soldiers as well as thugs, brazenly displayed on YouTube. Losing control, Calderón appealed to George Bush II for help. The result: the Mérida Initiative, a $400$ million-per-year program to provide aircraft, military equipment and training to the Mexican police and military. After decades of keeping its distance from the United States, the Mexican military--like the armed forces of Colombia, Honduras and other Latin American countries--is becoming a Pentagon client. In turn, Mexican society is itself becoming militarized. Corrupt local police are being replaced by soldiers who may be slightly less corrupt but who are a greater threat to human rights and democracy. An April Human Rights Watch report identified seventeen specific cases of abuse by the Mexican military, including "killings, torture, rapes, and arbitrary detentions." To his credit, Barack Obama has acknowledged what his predecessors failed to: that the US demand for drugs and its supplying of arms makes it an enabler in the rise of narco warlords. But he has also made it clear that neither issue is on his administration's agenda. Moreover, just as Bill Clinton carried the water for George Bush I's NAFTA, Barack Obama has endorsed Bush II's Mérida Initiative. Given the unwillingness of US politicians to deal with the demand side of the market, the Mérida Initiative is not likely to be any more successful in eradicating the drug trade than the $6 billion Plan Colombia has been. The best one can hope for is some sort of market-sharing deal among the cartels that would be implicitly endorsed by the Mexican government while Washington tactfully averts its eyes. Given that in many areas, drug money is the chief source of campaign financing, a PRI-dominated Mexican Congress might be just the right forum for a cynical, but welcome, end to the killings. Meanwhile, the drug violence has frightened away tourists and investors, making Mexico's recession even worse. Most forecasters expect the economy to contract some 6 percent this year--a huge hit to a country in which 45 percent live on $2 a day or less. Calderón's response is to tread water--rescuing big businesses that speculated on Wall Street derivatives and dribbling out a bit more public spending--while waiting for the United States to once again suck up Mexico's surplus labor. But even when the US economy recovers, it is unlikely to re-create the credit boom that kept the NAFTA deal afloat. In the post-crash era, the United States will finally be forced to address its trade deficits and its massive foreign debt. Americans will have to slow down consumer spending, increase savings and sell more to--and buy less from--the rest of the world. If Mexico could not prosper during fifteen years of exporting goods and people to a bloated US consumer market, it is hard to believe it will be able to do so when that market has slimmed down. The entire relationship must be rethought. In this regard, Obama's abandonment of his campaign pledge to renegotiate NAFTA was a missed opportunity. A renewed debate over the trade deal could have spurred public discussion of the failure of neoliberal economics, the "war on drugs" and an immigration policy that ignores conditions in Mexico that drive people across the border. It could have been a forum to think through the question of how continental integration can work for working people rather than just investors. For example, what kind of cooperative transportation, energy and green industrial policies would make the people of three nations--now bound together in one market--globally competitive? Obama's Wall Street advisers have no more interest in this sort of change than did Bush's. And without a new economic direction, life for the average Mexican will surely worsen and social tensions rise. Some Mexican friends point out that the revolution against Spain erupted in 1810 and the one against the US-backed dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1910. And in 2010... ? In any event, Mexico's growing troubles will not stay conveniently on the other side of the Rio Grande. Build a ten-foot wall, and desperate people will find twelve-foot ladders. Free trade will, of course, continue to flourish; Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano estimates that Mexican drug cartels are now operating in 230 US cities. So, thanks to the people who brought you the subprime mortgage disaster, the credit freeze and the Great Recession, the next Mexican revolution may come closer to home than you think. Jeff Faux is the founder and former president of the Economic Policy Institute and the author of the new book The Global Class War, a study of the impact of globalization abroad and on U.S. living standards and politics. 2009 The Nation All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141452/

Right-Wingers Are Stirring Up Xenophobia to Swiftboat Health Reform By Joshua Holland, AlterNet Posted on August 4, 2009, Printed on August 8, 2009 http://www.alternet.org/story/141739/ Along with death and taxes, a third thing of which one can be certain is that conservative politicians will exploit Americans concerns about illegal immigration to rally opposition to any policy that might help ordinary working people. The specter of unauthorized migrants sucking hungrily from the public teat is a tried-and-true method of turning people against their own interests.  We heard the narrative used to attack the stimulus package, federal aid to needy families, housing assistance and the State Childrens Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP). Forget about how these measures might impact their constituents -- lawmakers told us they had to oppose them to prevent hard-working Americans from being forced to subsidize foreigners who had broken the law. It fits neatly within the larger right-populist memes that fuel much of the immigration debate -- an out-of-control government that doesnt only fail to uphold the law, but also, unimaginably, offers benefits to "illegal aliens" that are denied to ordinary Americans.   So it was inevitable that the unsettled and emotionally charged issue of immigration would be used as a cudgel against health reform. And it has -- not only by the usual motley crew of factually challenged pundits and radio hate-jocks, but by a number of conservative lawmakers. It is nothing short of a Big Lie. The bill passed by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee says: "Eligible individuals are citizens or lawfully admitted permanent residents of the U.S." In the House, a section of the Tri-Committee bill titled "NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS," states unequivocally: "Nothing in this subtitle shall allow federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States. As the saying goes, everyones entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. Yet the facts havent prevented Republicans opposed to Democrats’ health proposals from claiming the opposite to be true. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., drawled to reporters, "This health care plan, Obamacare, is going to give every single one of those illegal aliens health insurance at the cost of taxpayers." Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., came up with the exquisitely moronic talking point, "if you dont like illegal immigration, then youre not going to like this bill either." Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, even went so far as to issue a press release falsely claiming that a Congressional Budget Office analysis projected that the House health legislation would cover 5.6 million unauthorized immigrants by 2019.  Of course, the CBO never said any such thing. Because just as the idea that we dont sink an enormous amount of resources into punishing those who break our immigration laws is patently false, so too is the entire issue of unauthorized immigrants getting Cadillac benefits from the government. The nonpartisan FactCheck.org noted, "illegal immigrants arent eligible for federal health programs under current law."  Theyre right. The reality is that the whole issue is a red herring -- the U.S. denies virtually all public benefits to unauthorized immigrants. In fact, we even restrict their availability to legal immigrants.   The very few exceptions to that rule amount to a miniscule fraction of public budgets. And they're for reasons that most people would agree are eminently reasonable. At least, thats my opinion. Here are the facts -- you decide whether they constitute a "free lunch for illegal immigrants," as some claim.  The 1996 welfare law (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act" for those scoring at home), which governs all federal benefits for the poor (not just health benefits), divides noncitizens into two categories in terms of eligibility for government assistance: "qualified" and "not qualified." All unauthorized immigrants are "not qualified," but there are also limitations on public benefits for "qualified" legal immigrants. (Even if they work and pay taxes and have all their papers in order, theyre still ineligible for the first five years of their residency.)  That means that even without the rather clear wording in the health bills released so far, unauthorized immigrants would still be ineligible for benefits under the legislation, just as they are for Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), foster care, adoption assistance, the Child Care and Development Fund, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, most federal food programs, unemployment insurance, low-income federal housing and everything else the federal government offers citizens and eligible permanent residents.   Also contrary to popular belief, a person cant simply offer up a fake Social Security number and access benefits from which he or she is barred. Another piece of Clinton-era legislation, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IRRIRA), requires federal, state and local agencies administering any federal benefit to independently verify the immigration and citizenship status of all applicants.  Now lets look at those exceptions. As a matter of policy, we dont let human beings simply die in the streets if their papers arent in order. In 2001, the Department of Justice published a list of services that were deemed necessary to protect life or safety," and these are exempt from immigration checks. They include emergency health care, protective services, soup kitchens, disaster relief, public shelters, public vaccination programs and similar services. Then there are school breakfast and lunch programs that are open to all, as are programs like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). There are also certain categories of authorized immigrants that are exempt from the five-year waiting period, including victims of human trafficking, refugees, people granted asylum, Cuban and Haitian entrants waiting to be processed, as well as a few other groups.  Contrary to the right-populist mythology that out-of-touch bureaucrats are coming up with massive handouts that attract undocumented immigrants from around the world, these exceptions -- a drop in the federal budgetary bucket -- are generally based on common sense. Offering emergency services to everyone is a matter of basic human rights. Prenatal care, school lunches and other child services are an investment in the next generation, and a majority of young foreign-born children will eventually become permanent residents and members of our workforce; those born here to migrant parents are already U.S. citizens. Vaccination programs are essential to building herd immunity" that protects foreign- and native-born alike.  Anti-immigration hard-liners may well oppose even those very modest social protections offered to that small number of undocumented immigrants. But rather than honestly argue that we in fact shouldnt protect battered women from abusive spouses unless they have valid papers, or that we shouldnt feed undocumented school kids or evacuate unauthorized immigrants from flooded areas -- arguments that would expose the degree of animosity in their hearts -- they prefer to push the Big Lie that people are coming from around the world to get "free premium health care" courtesy of Medicare, Medicaid and similar programs.  A final irony is that those members of Congress who peddle such myths also tend to be the same lawmakers who oppose the kind of comprehensive systemic fixes to the country's approach to immigration control that might actually reduce the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.   Given the degree to which some right-wingers use the issue against just about every halfway progressive policy that comes along, one almost has to wonder whether theyre actually "pro-illegal-immigration" themselves. After all, if the U.S. ever managed to successfully do away with the phenomenon entirely, a lot of these politicians would lose their favorite argument -- false, but reliable in stirring up passions -- against just about everything under the sun. Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. © 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141739/ http://www.amnestyusa.org/justice/ the justice without borders project "We're in the midst of what could really be called a revolution in the area of human rights and international justice... Already we have seen people come to justice who I'm sure never expected that they would ever be brought before a court of law, who thought that they could murder not just tens but hundreds of thousands of people and live to retire in some luxurious palace somewhere. We have shown that this can be stopped." – Larry Cox, Executive Director, Amnesty International USA http://americasvoiceonline.org/enough!!!!! |More Share| http://www.warresisters.org/index.php http://www.hanguponwar.org/ http://votersforpeace.us/index2.php http://www.nwtrcc.org/ The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11 http://steetsblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/love-ellen http://action.aclu.org/calling_congress Top 200 Contractors Government Executive August 15, 2007 Total Purchases: $425,636,035,480 US: Defense and oil company executives reap windfalls from Iraq war http://usforeignpolicy.about.com/od/backgroundhistory/a/thinkngo.htm?p=1 http://steetsblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/samaritans-has-been-voice-of-compassion.html http://www.ucc.org/100kforpeace/ http://yournetwork.tv/episode_terror_expenditures.php Mexico and the Merida Initiative: Make Human Rights the Core Amnesty International welcomes human rights protections in Congress' final version of the aid package, known as the "Merida Initiative," to fight drug cartels in Mexico and Central America. The final bill is an important first step to prevent military and police abuses, including torture. The implementation of the aid package will depend on the commitment by Mexican, Central American and U.S. authorities. The first block of funding for the so-called Merida Initiative was signed into law by President Bush on June 30, 2008.