University students across Texas this week joined San Antonio students in a hunger strike aimed at pressuring U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison to vote for the DREAM Act, a bill that would provide a path to citizenship for students and soldiers brought to the country illegally as children.

Started two weeks ago by a dozen students at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the hunger strike spread this week to UT campuses in Austin, Dallas, Arlington, Brownsville and Edinburg, as well as the University of North Texas in Denton, according to members of DREAM Act NOW!, the UTSA student group that organized the strike.

The group is part of a national coalition called United We DREAM, which brings together activists in each state. Universities in Florida and Indiana have also begun striking in solidarity, members said.

“Now that they have seen we are still going and not planning to stop, some have joined us,” said Claudia Sanchez, one of the UTSA strikers. Sanchez, 29, is a U.S. citizen, but many of her fellow strikers are in the country illegally.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_new...

for Immigration Reform


*** I welcome your opinion, no matter on what side of this debate you are. Please share. BTW, save the "cookie-cutter" comments like 'advocating for open border', 'what part of illegal don't you understand, etc. Thank you ***


Immigration Reform is one of the most divisive debates in our nation today and xenophobic sentiment, fueled by an ailing economy, is at an all time high. But the backlash against immigrants, in legal status or not, is not new in our nation’s history and its causes are not economical, as people today may claim.

In truth, the only underlying cause for this behavior is the same that led us to devastate our Native American tribes; that led us to condone the enslavement of people based on the color of their skin; that kept women as a sub-citizen for centuries. Is that same condition which still reprimands sexual feelings and sexual orientation, which pitches neighbor against neighbor because of their different beliefs, nation against nation because, somehow, one’s successes have become incomprehensively dependent on someone else’s failure. We call this underlying cause fear and because of fear, this nation is turning its back on itself.

America is moving away from its own core values whereby all men are created equal, whereby all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These same values have brought immigrants to our shores in centuries past and keep bringing them in today. But how do we reconcile this ideal of equality amongst ourselves with the state of the millions of undocumented living in our society today? How did the signers of the Declaration reconcile the substance of that document with the reality of slavery at the time it was written? They didn’t. They chose to ignore the problem. Likewise, leaders in this country have been ignoring social reform of our immigration laws and the reality of our immigrant population.

In the absence of the rule of law, human passions will undoubtedly find refuge in fear. People who aren’t lead in the right direction, will very likely steer in the wrong direction. How many undocumented women in labor will we have to tie to their hospital beds before we understand that this is not the right path for America? How many American born children will be left in schools because their parents were arrested during an immigration raid? How many immigrants have to fear, or become a victim of a hate crime, before we address the issue? Are we waiting for a new generation of “strange fruits” hanging from trees before we decide to act?

This fear of incorporating new cultures is not a novelty. Fear brought about the Nineteenth Century Chinese Exclusion Act, fear created an Immigration Act that allowed only for “free white persons” to become citizens until very recent in our nation’s history. the one It was fear that allowed for a provision in the law banning immigration of individuals who are HIV-positive and fear is keeping us from reforming a system that is crippling this nation’s heritage and future. The times of ‘Irish Need Not Apply’ deserve no place in modern American society. Neither does the fear that America will cease to exist if when we incorporate new cultures.

Many will always use the argument that once a person broke the law, being such a person in the country illegally, he or she needs punishment in the form of automatic deportation, regardless of having established roots in this society. But is the law always right? Were the Jews aboard the ‘Exodus 1947’ wrong when they tried to “illegally” enter British controlled Palestine? Would someone argue today that the system that kept married women as property under common law, her rights relinquished to that of her husband, was a sound law? Can one affirm that blacks pursuing their liberty on Northern States were acting illegally or that the Fugitive Act, which required citizens to assist in the capture of slaves in order to return them to their slave owners, was morally correct?

In America, we are not taught to assume that the laws on the books are always correct. Our revered Constitution was amended several times because we should be able to revisit unsound policy. That is why a legislature and a judicial system was put in place. That is why we need to turn fear and prejudices aside and muster the courage to debate this issue.

Today, opponents of immigration reform are pushing the argument that the country should be addressing issues like the suffering economy before deciding to give jobs to foreigners. This is a false choice, for the millions of people living without proper documents are already in the country working. They state that immigrants depress wages and flood the marketplace with cheap labor. If true, isn’t this is a great argument for reform? To bring people out of the shadows so that employers may not take advantage of them and so that employees are all playing by the same rules? Furthermore, the presence of immigrants, even those here without papers, is a true economic boost. After all, people here still have to eat, commute, pay for shelter and clothing, all activities that will benefit some industry and the country overall. The fact is that, for opponents of reform, there will never be a good time for reforming our immigration system, not in a good economy, not in a bad one.

Anti-reform advocates have pushed their agenda, by stating that they are against “illegals” only, perpetuating the myth that America has a great immigration system where anyone can enter legally if they fill the right forms and wait a reasonable period in line. The reality is that the laws on the book are outdated and do not reflect the needs of our economic engine. Arbitrary quotas in the employment-based system made it impossible for employers to fill the positions they needed with legal workers during the boom years. This created a black market of workers that kept coming in to fill the ranks of the American labor force. Long and unreasonable waits of a decade or more also plague the family-based system, making its goal of family unification completely useless. What does it say about our immigration policy when a foreign-born adult son of an American citizen has to wait 10-12 years to receive a permanent resident card, on top of an additional five years if he is pursuing citizenship?

There is also a myth that immigrants come here illegally because they want to exploit our resources. This myth states that undocumented immigrants have no commitment to our laws and thus no commitment to our society. Immigrants are portrayed living in ghettos, looking and dressing differently, making no effort to learn English or integrate into American culture. Stereotypes are plenty. There are indeed people who could not care less about American society, have no regards whatsoever to their neighbors. Some of them did cross the Mexican border; some of them flew in and overstayed their visa. Some where actually born and bred in American soil, for nationality is not a determinant of character.

Most undocumented are your neighbors, people who wake up early in the morning and kiss their families goodbye to work. They are sitting at our side on buses and trains, they are taking communion with us at church, they are coaching our kid’s soccer teams, they are active in our schools, they are serving our meals; they are helping us build this country, brick by brick, like every immigrant generation before them. And most of them don’t take America for granted. They know this is the place that has given them the opportunity that they did not find in the land they left behind. They work extra hard every morning because they have a sense of duty to their families and to this nation. Nobody will come this far to settle for failure. The immigrant story, throughout our history, is one of greatness and overachievement.

We carved it into our biggest symbol as to remember where we come from. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free”. Through the ages this issue has been challenging our social structure; it has been generating the fear of loosing privilege, the fear of moving into the unknown. But as James Baldwin once said, the rise of my brother does not mean the fall of another. Fear not abolishing these divisions for we are all human beings filled with the desire to create a better world for our children. This nation was built under the ideal of greatness and America will only rise stronger if we contemplate and solve this challenge like we solved others before.

Reforming our system means recognizing that we failed to implement a reasonable immigration policy. It means recognizing that we will benefit from fully welcoming undocumented migrants who have established themselves in our communities and are an indelible and vital part of our society. The system is broken and the American way demands one reasonable solution: let us fix the problem.

A dispatch from Cullman, Alabama:

Another local resident asked Shelby if there was any truth to a rumor that appeared during the presidential campaign concerning Obama’s U.S. citizenship, or lack thereof.

“Well his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate,” Shelby said. “You have to be born in America to be president.”

I emailed Shelby's spokesman, Jonathan Graffeo, to ask if Shelby believes there's substance to this rumor, for which no supporting evidence has ever emerge, and which has been debunked repeatedly and in detail.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/020...


HUH?!?

Hispanics Sentenced Latinos made up only 13 percent of the United States adult population in 2007, but they accounted for one third of federal prison inmates that year, a result the study attributed to the sharp rise in illegal immigration and tougher enforcement of immigration laws.

Nearly half of Latino offenders, or about 48 percent, were convicted of immigration crimes, while drug offenses were the second-most-prevalent charge, according to the report.

As the annual number of federal offenders more than doubled from 1991 to 2007, the number of Latino offenders sentenced in a given year nearly quadrupled, to 29,281 from 7,924.

Of Latino federal offenders, 72 percent are not United States citizens and most were sentenced in courts from one of the four states that border Mexico. Federal prisoners who are illegal immigrants are usually deported to their home countries after serving their sentences.

“The immigration system has essentially become criminalized at a huge cost to the criminal justice system, to courts, to judges, to prisons and prosecutors,” said Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “And the government has diverted the resources of the criminal justice system from violent crimes, financial skullduggery and other areas that have been the traditional area of the Justice Department.”

More at the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/us/19imm...

The Return of Immigration As a Wedge Issue

Editor’s Note: Contrary to popular wisdom after the 2008 elections, immigration as a wedge issue can restore Republicans to power, says a new report from The American Cause. Political scientist Angelo Falcón disputes that but says it would be unwise to dismiss The American Cause as a fringe element, either. Falcón is president and founder of the National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP), a policy center founded in 1982 in New York City that focuses on Latino policy issues. Immigration Matters reflects the views of leading immigration rights advocacy groups.

Pat and Bay Buchanan, Peter Brimelow, James Pinkerton and company seek to tell the Republican Party what they need to do to win back power in 2010: use immigration as a wedge issue. Through a 16-year-old outfit called The American Cause, founded by Pat Buchanan and friends, they are promoting “traditional American values” rooted in the “conservative principles of national sovereignty, economic patriotism, limited government, and individual freedom.” Hey, wait a minute, isn’t this why the Republicans lost the White House and Congress last year?

Well, they argue, that’s the Democrats and the left promoting one of those cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies (you know, when correlation does not imply causation), according to a new report, “Immigration and the 2008 Republican Defeat.” Written by The American Cause Executive Director Marcus Epstein (who also heads anti-immigration congressman Tom Tancredo’s Team America and is vice president of something modestly called Youth for Western Civilization), the report asserts that the immigration issue was, in fact, not detrimental to Republican candidates. It concludes that “immigration control could be the issue to bring the GOP back into the majority.”

For full text:
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_...




I want to believe a majority of the electorate will continue to repudiate the negative discourse on immigration and punish candidates who want to inherit Tancredo's mantle, but I do fear that Republicans will be successful generating enough fear in the community due to the current economic scenario.

WASHINGTON — Of nearly 2.2 million immigrants deported in the decade ended 2007, more than 100,000 were the parents of children who, having been born in the United States, were American citizens, according to a report issued Friday by the Department of Homeland Security.

But the department lacks data that might have addressed questions left unanswered by the report, like the number of American children who were left behind in the United States or, alternatively, exited the country with their deported parents. Nor could the report say in how many instances both parents of such children were deported.

Similarly, said Representative José E. Serrano, Democrat of New York, since no one knows how many children a given deportee had, the number of affected children could be much higher than 108,434, the exact number of deported parents of American citizens.

So “the problem goes deeper than just the numbers you see,” said Mr. Serrano, who requested the study. He called the circumstance “tragic.”

“If they took their children back,” he said of the deportees, “then technically we deported an American citizen. No matter which side of the immigration issue you fall on, there’s something wrong with the notion of kicking American citizens out of their own country.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/us/14imm...

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Tuesday he is creating a new Tent City jail for illegal immigrants and would segregate those detainees behind an electrified fence.

Arpaio said his office will put 200 illegal immigrants in chains Wednesday and march them from existing jail facilities into the segregated tent area at the county jail near 35th Avenue and Durango Road.

Arpaio has been aggressive in his enforcement of immigration violations and said the new Tent City would free up space in existing jails and help the county save money on the cost of housing illegals until they are deported or sentenced for other crimes.

http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories...

AND

Sheriff Joe Arpaio Marches Immigrants Through Public Square

New America Media, Commentary, Douglas Rivlin, Posted: Feb 05, 2009

Editor’s Note: On Wednesday, Maricopa County, Ariz. Sheriff Joe Arpaio marched shackled immigrants through the streets of Phoenix as a show of force and to promote his Fox Reality Channel television program. Meanwhile, former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, the new Secretary of Homeland Security, has called for a review of Homeland Security immigration enforcement measures, including 287g, which allows local police to enforce federal civil immigration law. Maricopa County has entered into a 287g agreement with the federal government that gives Sheriff Arpaio greater latitude to go after immigrants, whether or not they are accused of committing criminal offenses. Douglas Rivlin is communications director of the National Immigration Forum, a non-partisan pro-immigrant advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_...


Do we really need to be promoting this guy on TV?