kdeb33's blog

Picture from the Boston Herald.

What a sad day.Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who was elected with a wave of hope, has turned his back on migrants.

Governor Deval Patrick has decided against taking action to allow illegal immigrants to pay resident tuition and fees at state colleges and universities this fall, an administration official said yesterday, crushing advocates who were counting on the governor to deliver on a pledge to support the students.

Maria Sacchetti - Boston Globe (22 May 2008)

This is a sad day for hundreds of migrant youth, whose only hope to go to college this year was crushed.What makes this an even harder pill to swallow is that Patrick is turning his back on a promise he made during his campaign.

We will have in-state tuition for undocumented aliens when I am governor.

Deval Patrick - WBZTV (4 April 2006)

Originally Posted on Citizen Orange

I was excited to find out over the weekend that David Neiwart, through his own blog and a cross-post on Firedoglake linked to me and others in the pro-migrant blogosphere in the last post of his three-part series on immigration:

The blogosphere can have a role in this change as well. There is a wealth of blogs out there dealing with immigration and Latino issues on a regular basis, and many of them feature not just important perspectives that need to be part of the conversation, but compelling and powerful writing as well.

A sampling: Migra Matters, Latina Lista, Matt Ortega,Immigration Prof Blog, The Silence of our Friends, Citizen Orange, The Unapologetic Mexican ... well, the list is long, and this one is certainly incomplete. But you get the idea. [ Source :David Neiwart]

I encourage you to use my blogroll on the right to complete that list, but now that he's finished his series I thought I'd use it as an opportunity to insert my own commentary, and hopefully build or hone on what was a massive and ambitious undertaking for Neiwart. Neiwart wrote three posts. One introducing his series, a second debunking a lot of the anti-migrant myths that exist, and a third with proposals about how to move forward.

While the first two posts were informative, I'm going to spend my time on Dave's third post, "Immigration: Looking Forward". This post is the second major migrant manifesto to emerge out of the blogosphere, coming after Duke's post that garnered a front-page spot on Daily Kos. In his post, Neiwart outlines what a "liberal program for comprehensive immigration reform" would contain:

Originally posted on Citizen Orange.

I admire people that work to build unity where there is division.  Building unity leads humanity in the direction of ideals.  Building consensus is admirable, but compromising with hate is not.

In her Washington Post op-ed, "The Right Road to America?", Yale Law Professor Amy Chua compromises with hate.  In an attempt to forge a middle ground between tolerance and toughness, she makes deals with the devil.  The net result is an argument that rests on nativism. 

Chua makes the fallacious argument that, within nations, "pluralism and diversity" leads to "violence and instability".  Reading her op-ed, I couldn't help but be reminded of the lunatic mission statement of Frosty Wooldridge's website (Another front for NumbersUSA):

Our English language is under assault and our schools
are drowning in ethnic violence, rapes, drugs and gang warfare. In
California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, our hospitals suffer bankruptcies
from non-paid services for 350,000 annual 'anchor babies'. Ten million
illegal immigrants displace jobs from America's working poor and depress
wages for many others. Leprosy, tuberculosis, Chagas Disease, hepatitis
and other diseases 'pour' into our country within the bodies of illegal
immigrants who avoid health screening before coming on board the United
States. Even worse, clashing cultures with religions that celebrate
'female genital mutilation' and subjugation of women are growing in
enclaves around our country. As Lincoln said, "A house divided against
itself can not stand." [...]

Our leaders are outsourcing and offshoring our
jobs to Third World countries while they import the Third World into our
country. America's middle class is being driven into the unemployment
lines. Our schools are becoming dysfunctional towers of Babel with over
140 languages. We can not stay afloat with this kind of linguistic chaos.
Yes, we have compassion for immigrants, but it's our country and our
children. Their leaders need to take care of them in their countries.
Unfortunately, Congress and leadership of this nation refuse to step
below the water line to see how fast we are sinking. We're $6.8 trillion
in debt. There were 20 different languages on the California recall
ballot. Whose country is this anyway?

- Frosty Wooldridge

Chua is certainly more logical and less extreme in her nativism than Wooldridge is.  But the premise of their arguments is the same.  Migrants subvert the U.S.'s national identity.

An Appeal to the Migratory

"Racism", "Pluralism", and "National Identity", are all very complicated terms that Chua plays with in her op-ed.  It would take a pages to define each of them and their interactions with migrants, and a whole books to discuss how they're interrelated.  What's worse, I've added another term to the mix: "Nativism".   Chua is smart.  She is not a political scientist or a philosopher.  Rather than weave her own argument, she draws on the work of Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, and his book, Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity.  I'm not going to delve into a critique of Huntington's book in this post.  Alan Wolfe does a good job in Foreign Affairs for those that are interested.

Either way, the most important thing to remember about all of these terms, is that they have systemic connotations.  That means that it doesn't matter what you're background, views, or actions are as an individual, it says nothing about your systemic views.  People of color can be racist.  Women can be sexist.  Migrants can be nativist.  The cracks in Chua's epistemology start to show when she uses her individual experience to make systemic arguments.   Readers should raise their eyebrows when she uses her parents to justify her support for Huntington.

Are we, as the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warns,
in danger of losing our core values and devolving "into a loose
confederation of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with
little or nothing in common apart from their location in the territory
of what had been the United States of America"?

My parents arrived in the United States in 1961, so poor that they
couldn't afford heat their first winter. I grew up speaking only
Chinese at home (for every English word accidentally uttered, my sister
and I got one whack of the chopsticks). Today, my father is a professor
at Berkeley, and I'm a professor at Yale Law School. As the daughter of
immigrants, a grateful beneficiary of America's tolerance and
opportunity, I could not be more pro-immigrant.

Originally posted on Citizen Orange

I'm proud to have another link in the pro-migrant blogroll, today.  T. Don Hutto is a blog "dedicated to providing information on the growing movement to shut
down Hutto and prevent this model of immigrant detention from spreading
nationally". 

The "Don Hutto Family Residential Facility", was the first prison designed specifically for immigrant families.  It is run by the Corrections Corporation of America, the U.S.'s largest for-profit corrections company.   If the thought of profiting from one of the largest prison populations in the world isn't sickening enough, check out the information the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has on the Hutto Detention Center.  The letter I've pasted here, from a detained child identified as Kevin to the Canadian Prime Minister, has haunted my dreams.  I will quote it below.

Originally posted on Citizen Orange

Bob Dylan - The Times They Are A-Changin'

Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.
    - Lyrics

I never thought I'd see the day when I could safely say that the pollsters, the pundits, and the establishment democrat bloggers would turn toward the light migrant justice.  That day has come and it only affirms one of the Doctor Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s most hopeful themes.

The arc of the
moral universe is long but it bends toward justice
    - Doctor Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

After Republicans failed with their anti-migrant rhetoric in Virginia, the powers that be have begun to sing a different tune.  Duke at Migra Matters was the first to pick up on how the tone has changed.  This is a Washington Post article before the results were in:

Originally posted on
(Peter Pereira / New Bedford Standard-Times)

I can safely say that this is the saddest story I've had to tell of an individual suffering from U.S. immigration policy.

I've written story after story about the suffering of individuals. No matter how much suffering migrants go through U.S. citizens just seem not to care, in effect, if not intent. Anti-migrant advocates actively ridicule dead migrants, and most progressives do nothing about it.

The New Bedford Standard-Times (please counter the hate people are spewing on this article) just published a story on the death of Ricardo Gomez Garcia.  He left an autistic child and his wife behind after the horror of New Bedford.  After fighting for five months in detention to stay in the U.S. he was deported back to Guatemala, where he made the choice to try and re-enter the U.S. again.  He met up with his family after the harrowing journey that I know so well, and fell ill.  After just 24 hours with his family, he died.

Skip to the end for how you can help.

The first time I learned about Garcia was a through a National Public Radio report on his family.  The report inspired me to write a comprehensive post on the New Bedford Raid.  I'm going to transcribe the NPR report below but keep in mind this was filed long before Garcia died.  Claudio Sanchez reports:

Claudio Sanchez: A three story apartment building at the end of a
narrow steep spiral stairway, a middle-aged woman no taller than
4'10'', black hair pulled tight in a bun, answers the door of a small
apartment.  A little boy clings to the woman's dress, he groans. 

"He doesn't speak," she says, "but he was born in this country". As if
that somehow made up for her son's disability.  We sit at a tiny table
against the kitchen wall.  It's really dark.  She's $200 behind on the
electric bill so she's trying to use as little electricity as
possible...

Juana in Spanish: "The problem that I'm dealing with right now...I am traumatized by the sadness of my husband..."

Claudio Sanchez: Her little boy, though, isn't eating well.  Today,
he's upset about something.  He thinks his father is coming home any
day, now.

Juana in Spanish: "He looked for him and showed me his clothes.  He showed me his
clothes and then looked towards the window, because he always looked
that way when he was coming home from work.  Once he saw him he would
wait for him at the door."

Claudio Sanchez: He points to his father's clothes in the closet and
stands by the window every afternoon waiting for him to arrive from
work.

Everything about this story points to love.  A lawyer describes Garcia's determination:

[Ondine Galvez Sniffin] noted that Mr. Garcia had a different
attitude than many of the Bianco detainees who were tired and ready to
go back to their home country.