Securing the votes in Congress to pass real immigration solutions into law isn’t going to be easy. The next President – no matter who wins – will need to lead his own party first to get it done.
Deputies said two men brandished a baseball bat and a tire iron, used racial slurs and threatened migrant mushroom pickers at a Marion convenience store. One of the workers took a gun from his vehicle, fired two shots in the air and the parties went their separate ways.
About two hours later, deputies say up to seven white men attacked migrant workers at a campground, allegedly hurling racial slurs and beer bottles at the migrants. One white man had a rifle and fired five or six shots in the air.
So here's the question: how much does the rightie anti-immigration rhetoric spur this kind of thing? Or does the rhetoric flow from this kind of nascent anger?
As long as I'm using obscure music references in German to title posts, I figured this was a natural choice to talk immigration.
Simon Rosenberg notes the utter hollowness of immigration as an issue. If it really is so motivating, why is Tom Tancredo at 1%?
It occurred to me recently that there are really only two prominent voices in the immigration debate: the elite "centrist" position, advocating for a guest worker program that hurts American workers and keeps foreign workers as a second class, and a right-wing populist position, that blames the workers themselves for the problems in the economy.
Neither of these positions is really tenable in the framework of progressive populism. And the major voice from the left too often takes the form of an international liberal view that thinks our only priority should be on rectifying foreign economies rather than dealing with any problems potentially caused by immigration here in America.
In other words, there's a valuable -- and I think correct -- perspective missing from this debate in America.
Note: If you are tired of major issues like this getting no coverage in the face of a media blackout and thus you would like to see my nationally syndicated column in your local paper, see the bottom of this post on what to do to make that happen. - D
The debate taking place in America over illegal immigration is not just overheated. As I discuss in my new nationally syndicated column out this past Friday, the debate is dishonest. Both parties are trying to focus attention on the illegal immigration issue in order to distract attention from the underlying problem of worker exploitation and regressive economic/globalization policies that intensify the exploitation. We see it most often from Republicans, but we saw it just last week from Democrats at the presidential debate, as that debate only addressed the immigration issue from a punitive standpoint (driver's licenses, etc.) - rather than discussing the root of the issue, which is economic exploitation of all workers.
The fact is, both Democrats and Republicans know that exploitation is at the heart of illegal immigration, but neither party is really willing to confront that exploitation because that would mean confronting their big corporate donors who are profiting off the status quo. And so, taking a scapegoat play out of the Reagan and Clinton playbooks, the con artists in both parties are trying to channel Americans' intense anger at Big Money interests into a rage at illegal immigrants.
Much ado has been made of Hillary Clinton's on-again, off-again support for New York Governor Elliot Spitzer's plan to make it easier for immigrants to obtain U.S. driver's licenses. Detractors argue that it would make it easier for illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses (and the benefits that accompany a license), while Spitzer's supporters argue that the plan will actually increase national security (by allowing undocumented aliens to come out of the legal "shadows") and help immigrants economically. It's an interesting debate, and both arguments have their merit.
But wait! No! Spitzer (and Clinton) don't really support the policy for the reasons they say they do! It's really about voter fraud!
AmPro's Harold Meyerson and TNR's Eve Fairbanks give Senator Jon Tester guff for not voting for the recent immigration bill - the DREAM act.
Meyerson (emphasis mine):
What's striking about this list of anti-DREAM Dems is how it overrepresents states that have minimal immigrant presence. Precisely because immigrants come to work, they tend not to migrate to states with a dearth of economic activity, states like West Virginia and North Dakota. Montana isn't exactly clogged with south-of-the-border immigrants, either. Yet those three states are represented by five of the eight dissenting Democrats. What West Virginia and North Dakota do have in abundance, however, are working-class whites adrift in economic backwaters. Talk radio tells them that their problems are the fault of illegal immigrants. Marx once famously referred to the idiocy of rural life, which is still a pretty good encapsulation of what's wrong with the Senate, the legislative house that represents land rather than people. Still, it's worth noting that a number of Democrats from socially conservative states -- not least, South Dakota's Tim Johnson, who's up for re-election next year, and Jim Webb from the presumably anti-immigrant hotbed of Virginia -- voted to support the DREAM Act.
First, personal feelings on immigration reform aside, when has Jon Tester ever said anything about supporting an immigration bill that included amnesty? Answer: never. From the get-go, he's walked a hard line on immigration.
With Jon, you get what you're promised. That's why we elected him.
Tester's position is that we should enforce the existing international labor agreements and pressure south-of-the-border countries to improve wages and work conditions. Then illegal immigrants won't want to come to the United States. While I disagree with Jon on amnesty, I don't disagree here. Why aren't we talking about labor agreements instead of amnesty? That would seem to be a winning issue with American voters. Of course it would mean biting the hand that feeds the Senate...
Second, "idiocy of rural life"? And you wonder why states like Montana gravitate away from the left. Maybe instead of using states like Montana as a rhetorical foil to be disdained or ridiculed, folks should see Montana as a battleground state holding the keys to electoral victory in 2008 and beyond...
Just got back East from a trip to Yellowstone & Grand Teton and was shocked at how quickly the towns on the west side of the Tetons are growing. I have visited this area many times, but much has changed since my last visit in 1999.
For those unfamiliar with the area, the towns of Driggs, Victor, and Tetonia, Idaho sit on the western face of the Teton Range. Across the Targhee Pass is Wilson, WY and the expansive valley more commonly known as Jackson Hole.
This is my first post at Left In the West since moving from Montana to Denver a few weeks ago. I miss Big Sky country already. I figured, though, that since this site is about politics in the West generally, and because Matt has been blogging a lot about immigration, I'd cross-post this here. - D
Politically, I don't usually agree with the Denver Post's David Harsanyi - but the guy has a really important point in today's paper about the "debate" that happened over immigration recently. "A debate typically entails two sides hashing out an issue with facts, rebuttals and so on," he writes. "Not here. It was like watching my grandparents discuss dinner plans." Exactly - and there's a reason why a real debate never happened. Because a real debate would force the money-drenched political Establishment to confront the very questions it is designed to avoid - the questions of economic inequality that corporate interests want swept under the rug.
In the interest of preventing redundancy, let me just repost an excerpt of what I wrote a little more than a year ago in a column for the San Francisco Chronicle:
Amid all the rhetoric in the superheated immigration debate, many have forgotten the key question: Why? Why do so many Mexicans want to come to America in the first place?...Many Mexicans are willing to risk their lives to enter the United States illegally because they are desperate to find a better life. In supply-and-demand terms, the supply of jobs in Mexico that one can subsist on is far less than the demand for such jobs...This is the supply-and-demand reality that no amount of emotional rhetoric can change - and in that reality we can find the way to address illegal immigration: by stopping the demand instead of trying to block the supply. The Academy Award-winning movie, "Traffic," highlighted the perils of waging a drug war that only focuses on trying to block the supply of narcotics, rather than on eliminating the demand for them. These same lessons can be applied to illegal immigration. The best way to stop illegal entry into our country from Mexico is to tamp down the demand by Mexicans to enter this country illegally. After all, no wall, no fence, no border security measure can be as effective as reducing the demand for entry. This means reforming our trade policy to include serious wage, workplace and human-rights provisions so that cross-border commerce actually improves the lives of Mexican workers to the point where they no longer feel the dire economic need to break our immigration laws. Think about it this way: Had NAFTA lifted 19 million Mexicans out of poverty as promised instead of helping to drive 19 million Mexicans into poverty, you can bet the flood of illegal immigrants across our southern border would be a trickle instead of the flood it is today.
During the immigration "debate," there was almost no discussion of America's trade policy or how to reform it (and our foreign aid program) to economically lift up neighboring countries like Mexico. Why? Because trade policy is seen in Washington as the exclusive purview of corporate lobbyists - it is not looked at as a human issue. These trade pacts are really investor rights agreements - and ones that have long enjoyed the support of both parties and the Wall Street financiers who underwrite them. They are designed first and foremost to create desperate economic conditions in both America and in Mexico. The more desperation, the lower the wages, the more pressure to reduce environmental protection and the better able employers are to bust unions. The last thing those Democrats, Republicans and corporate lobbyists who crafted NAFTA wanted was a trade policy that actually lifted up Mexico's economy - because if that happened, there wouldn't be a cheap labor pool to exploit.
Even Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) refuses to address how the manipulation of our trade policy exacerbates the problem of illegal immigration he purports to care so much about. When he has questioned our trade policy, he has questioned only its non-economic provisions - but he has carefully stayed away from the more fundamental - and well-documented - criticism of how our existing policy exacerbates Latin American poverty and thus drives up pressure at our border.
I'm guessing Harsanyi, a conservative, doesn't agree with my fundamental critique of our existing trade policy. But I'd like to hope that he and others across the ideological spectrum can agree that the debate over immigration policy has to be over more than just walls, border patrols and paths to citizenship for those already here - it has to be about what is driving the entire situation.
The immigration "debate" we just had was not a debate - it was political theater, and bad political theater at that. If we want to really address the immigration question, we are going to need political leaders that are courageous enough to ask the real question - the questions of why.
Sadly, the right is celebrating the defeat of the immigration bill. There was a lot in the bill to dislike. But it's death is not worth celebrating.
Today, 12 million undocumented workers live in the shadows of the U.S. -- trying to escape detection and deportation. That combination of facts makes them an easy population to exploit. That, in turn, means marked downward pressure on wages in industries with lots of undocumented workers.
During the debate over this bill, Senators Tester and Baucus voted wrong. Repeatedly. They both voted to require police to turn over crime victims who they discovered were present illegally -- a quick way to avoid discovering rapists and murderers if key witnesses are worried about deportation.
These sorts of bad ideas were brought up repeatedly. Other amendments would require doctors and hospitals to turn over undocumented patients for deportation. Given public health concerns and the likelihood of a massive flu outbreak (or some other epidemic) soon, does it really make sense to scare sick people away from medicine?
The problem with the immigration debate is a lot like the problem with the abortion debate. Some people are so caught up in the individual actions that they simply don't care how the public policy will actually work as long as it reflects their moral beliefs. Nevermind that anti-choice policies have tended to increase abortion rates worldwide. Nevermind that abstinence-only sex education has led in somes cases to higher pregnancy and STD transmission rates. And nevermind that cracking down on the border and implementing punitive measures against immigrants has never worked to stop the flow of migration before. The mindset is simple: If it feels good to pass a bill, do it. And damn the actual consequences.
I've written here before that one of the most disheartening things during the immigration debate was to witness Tester and Baucus referring to these immigrants as "illegal aliens," a term loaded to sound as vicious as possible. Regardless of what else one might think of the policy, the people most directly impacted are still human -- and using the rhetoric of minutemen and other vigilantes who seek to threaten and harm Hispanic immigrants, sometimes without regard to their legal status.
As someone blessed by my birth to be a citizen of the United States, I have a tough time being so damn vindictive toward people who dream of attaining what I had simply for being born in the right place to the right parents. That's not to say that there aren't problems associated with immigration that we should try to fix, but the hatefulness and the knee-jerk reactions are simply unnecessary.
...the Senate voted 64-35 to revive the bill, which stalled earlier this month when it failed to muster the 60 votes it needed to scale procedural hurdles.
Twenty-four Republicans joined 39 Democrats and independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut to move ahead with the bill. Opposing the move were 25 Republicans, nine Democrats and independent Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont.
As Steve Benen notes, "a similar test-vote earlier this month found just 45 supporters (7 Republicans), while today generated 64 voted (including 24 Republicans)." (Tester and Baucus voted against cloture on the bill, which, in effect, was a vote to kill it.)
That is, 17 of the additional 19 votes were Republican.
Think of it, this immigration bill has earned the condemnation of just about every vocal grassroots member of the Republican Party's base, yet GOP support for the bill has tripled in the past month. That, of course, is what is driving Stanley Kurz wild.
But it's simple really. The division in the GOP over the immigration bill is between the party's base and the business community. Anybody who's been a casual observer of the political process in the past, oh, 140 years will know with which side "good" Republican lawmakers will side.
Something about this immigration battle doesn't sit well. For all the bitterness of our political battles, there's at least the sense that the government responds to the drift of public opinion. The Republicans in Congress turned into big spenders and the war in Iraq went poorly. As a result the Democrats prospered in 2006, if narrowly. That's how democracy works. Our politics are often angry and ugly (and that's a problem), but this is because the public is deeply divided on issues of great importance. Deep down, we understand that our political problems reflect our own divisions.
Somehow this immigration battle feels different. The bill is wildly unpopular, yet it's close to passing. The contrast with the high-school textbook version of democracy is not only glaring and maddening, it's downright embarrassing. Usually, even when we're at each others' throats, there's still an underlying pride in the democratic process. This immigration battle strips us of even that pride.
[snip]
You can't solve an argument by imposing a "compromise" on parties who don't actually view it as a compromise. You can't heal social divisions by forcing your version of a "solution" down the public's throats. Real healing comes only when two sides reach what they themselves consider a valid compromise, or when one side wins the argument by persuading a clear majority of the validity of its case. Democracy does work, but first the Senate has got to give it a try.
How many times have polls shown that Americans want a timetable for withdrawal? How many times have Republicans and the White House beat legislation in service of those sentiments back? And how many times has Stanley Kurtz written angry posts demanding that the government accept the will of the people?
Kurtz is all for small-d democracy. At least when its outcomes agree with his prejudices.
I admit it's been fun watching how previously gung-ho, pro-Bush conservatives react when the President questions their patriotism while shoving unpalatable and unpopular legislation down their throats.
On one hand, many conservatives really, really dislike illegal immigrants. On the other hand, they also dislike the strong exercise of federal power over state and local authority. (Yes, I'm generalizing. Stick with me.)
The Department of Homeland Security conducted an early morning raid of undocumented immigrants in New Haven on Wednesday, arresting dozens and prompting city officials to decry what they believe to be federal retaliation for city?s approval Monday of the first-in-the-nation municipal ID program.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents made 29 arrests Wednesday, according to a spokeswoman for the agency, and city officials said they expect more arrests over the course of the next two weeks. The officials described it as the first-ever mass arrest of illegal immigrants in recent New Haven history, but the ICE spokeswoman says the arrests are not politically driven and are ?routine.?
You think this isn't politically motivated? It would appear as if the federal government is flexing its might to intimidate a city council. It's not exactly what I expected when the Homeland Security Department was created. How about you?
You know, I don't usually read the hysterical right's blogs, but for some reason, I found myself gawking at a recent post by Michelle Malkin. I don't know why, exactly, maybe it was see the car crash between Bush and his erstwhile nativist paleo-conservative base, but I found it so surprisingly absurd, I just had to write about it.
Malkin is angry at Bush for hammering out the immigration bill, an attitude not uncommon to...well...everybody. She rails against Bush for using "empty rhetoric" (ironic, eh?), then quotes Article IV, Section IV of the Constitution, and accuses Bush of his own empty rhetoric for, apparently, not upholding his office by enforcing Malkin's bolded, italicized sections of said Constitutional section:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
Er...I think it's safe to say the constitutional architects had a military invasion by a sovereign nation on their mind, not immigration. And...how does illegal immigration fit in, one assumes, with a threat of domestic violence?
Is Malkin saying that there's a concerted and willful plot to destroy the United States by Latino immigrants? Seriously?
Someone more attuned to Malkin-speak please clarify. She can't be this ridiculously uninformed.
This has been a bad week for political messaging from Montana's Senators. First, they wanted to make sure everyone understood that a bill to withdraw from Iraq was anti-troop. Then, Max Baucus accused Senate leadership contemplating a "no-confidence" vote regarding embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales of engaging in political games. Now I get a press release explaining that they just proudly voted against "amnesty" for undocumented immigrants.
Fine -- but what's your solution, Max and Jon? Mass deportation? Round 'em up at gunpoint?
I'm no huge fan of the immigration bill -- check out the Drum Major Institute for more on why a progressive might have problems -- but raising the specter of "amnesty" for "illegal aliens" is straight out of a rightwing, xenophobic playbook.
The more we push undocumented immigrants underground, the more we encourage a festering underground economy in our own country -- an economy that directly undermines American workers.
