The Pink Flamingo :: The Consequences of No Humane Immigration Reform

Several of the more extreme anti-immigration blogs are furious over an article by an award winning Journalist, Andres Oppenheimer, stating that riots are eventually going to result from illegal immigration. The problem is they aren’t reading the entire article. It is seriously castigating both anti-immigration organizations and the panderers in Congress who have refused to come up with a humane solution to the problem.

“The rapid escalation of the U.S. anti-immigration hysteria -- fueled by ratings-hungry cable-television hotheads and leading Republican presidential hopefuls -- is a dangerous trend: It may lead to a Hispanic intifada that may rock this nation in the not-so-distant future….If we are not careful, we may see something similar coming from the estimated 13 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, most of them Hispanic, who are increasingly vilified in the media, forced further into the underground by spineless politicians and not given any chance to legalize their status by a pusillanimous U.S. Congress.

We are creating an underclass of people who won't leave this country and, realistically, can't be deported. They and their children are living with no prospect of earning a legal status, no matter how hard they work for it. Many of them will become increasingly frustrated, angry, and some of them eventually may turn violent. I was thinking about all of this when I read about last week's U.S. Senate refusal to pass the Dream Act, a bill that would offer a path to legalization to children of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States at a very young age, and who get a college degree or serve in the military….A study released last week by the Urban Institute and the National Council of La Raza says there are about five million U.S. children with at least one undocumented parent.

''The recent intensification of immigration enforcement activities by the federal government has increasingly put these children at risk of family separation, economic hardship, and psychological trauma,'' the report says. The study looked at the impact of recent U.S. immigration raids in Colorado, Nebraska and Massachusetts, where about 900 undocumented workers were arrested at their work sites, and their children -- most often infants -- were suddenly deprived of their fathers or mothers. ''The combination of fear, isolation, and economic hardship induced mental health problems such as depression, separation anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide thoughts,'' it said.

My opinion: We have to stop this xenophobic hysteria. And please, dear anti-immigration readers, don't tell me I'm being dishonest for failing to point out that you are not against legal immigration, but only against ``illegals.''
You are making a deceptive argument. Leaving aside the fact that nearly half of the undocumented immigrants came to this country legally, and overstayed their visas, their non-compliance with immigration rules should not stigmatize them with the label of ``illegals.''

DANGEROUS PATH
You may have violated a rule, but that should not make you an ''illegal'' person. You may have gotten a ticket for speeding, but that doesn't make you an ''illegal'' human being, even if the potential harm of your reckless driving is much greater than anything done by most of the hard-working undocumented immigrants in this country. Carrying out enforcement-only policies, labeling undocumented workers as ''illegals'' and depriving them of hope for upward mobility -- rather than working toward greater economic cooperation with Latin America to reduce migration pressures -- is not only wrong, but dangerous. The millions of undocumented among us will not leave. They will only get angrier….”

The Latin Americanist has a little background into Oppenheimer and his abject dislike of Hugo Chavez.

What Part of Illegal…From the NYTimes (Greg Siskind’s Blog)

“…I am a human pileup of illegality. I am an illegal driver and an illegal parker and even an illegal walker, having at various times stretched or broken various laws and regulations that govern those parts of life. The offenses were trivial, and I feel sure I could endure the punishments — penalties and fines — and get on with my life. Nobody would deny me the chance to rehabilitate myself. Look at Martha Stewart, illegal stock trader, and George Steinbrenner, illegal campaign donor, to name two illegals whose crimes exceeded mine.

Good thing I am not an illegal immigrant. There is no way out of that trap. It’s the crime you can’t make amends for. Nothing short of deportation will free you from it, such is the mood of the country today. And that is a problem.

America has a big problem with illegal immigration, but a big part of it stems from the word “illegal.” It pollutes the debate. It blocks solutions. Used dispassionately and technically, there is nothing wrong with it. Used as an irreducible modifier for a large and largely decent group of people, it is badly damaging. And as a code word for racial and ethnic hatred, it is detestable.

“Illegal” is accurate insofar as it describes a person’s immigration status. About 60 percent of the people it applies to entered the country unlawfully. The rest are those who entered legally but did not leave when they were supposed to. The statutory penalties associated with their misdeeds are not insignificant, but neither are they criminal. You get caught, you get sent home.

Since the word modifies not the crime but the whole person, it goes too far. It spreads, like a stain that cannot wash out. It leaves its target diminished as a human, a lifetime member of a presumptive criminal class. People are often surprised to learn that illegal immigrants have rights. Really? Constitutional rights? But aren’t they illegal? Of course they have rights: they have the presumption of innocence and the civil liberties that the Constitution wisely bestows on all people, not just citizens….”

A MINI RANT
I do believe I’ve been saying something similar to this for months now. You don’t disrupt the lives of several million young people, who may be “Illegal” but identify themselves as America and not suffer the consequences. You don’t split families apart and destroy homes without breeding contempt, horror, and even – terror. I think Oppenheimer is correct. We are breeding tomorrow’s terrorists today. And the whole problem can be prevented if we could calm the rhetoric, and remember we are a Christian nation with family values.

How ironic is the fact that “Christian” conservatives and the Family Values crowd are the ones who are breeding America’s very own Palestinian terrorists.

I was going to say more, but Greg Suskind hit it out of the park with this commentary.

“…And then there's a piece that certainly ties all these questions together and that is one in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Congressman James Sensenbrenner will re-introduce a bill along the lines of H.R. 4337, an extremely tough, zero-tolerance immigration enforcement bill. I blogged yesterday on the death of a "righteous gentile" who harbored Jews in World War II (who, incidentallly, were considered unauthorized immigrants when the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their citizenship). My post was mainly intended to remind people of the provisions in H.R. 4337 which would make it a felony to provide any kind of humanitarian assistance to illegal immigrants. That bill was more than just extremism on the part of a few far right members of the House. It passed the House in the last Congress, but moderates blocked it from being considered in the Senate.

That post, incidentally, has triggered some interesting and emotional replies from anti-immigrants who don't like such comparisons. They like the cover of pretending that this is about law and order and not raw nativism. They love immigrants don't you know? But it is no coincidence that immigration has replaced hatred of blacks and Jews as the main cause promoted by white supremacist groups in the country. And I doubt it is a is a coincidence that most of the vocal opposition in the Senate to any paths to legalization for unauthorized immigrants comes from Southern Senators who have a pretty checkered history in this department. than going after African-Americans….”