All Posts Tagged With: "immigration"

Most of the results were in.  With all but a few House and Senate seats nailed down, my attention turned to collecting the scattered results of all the ballot measures I was following this year.  By and large, it’s your standard culture war stuff: abortion, affirmative action, gay marriage.  Read more…

One of my favorite new senators, Claire McCaskill, recently disappointed me by voting to sustain a filibuster against the DREAM Act, which would have given young illegal immigrants a chance at citizenship if they (1) were brought here as children by their parents, (2) graduate high school, and (3) either complete two years of college or serve two years in the military. The idea, basically, is to not hold children responsible for the actions of their parents so long as they grow up to be responsible adults.

Interestingly enough, 11 Republicans (including decidedly non-moderate ones like Trent Lott, Orrin Hatch, and Sam Brownback) voted against the filibuster, which would have been enough to kill it were it not for the 8 Democrats (including McCaskill, Mary Landrieu, and Jon Tester) who voted for it.

If even this relatively modest reform can’t get passed, things don’t look good for anything comprehensive any time soon. And this is one of the few issues on the agenda today (Iraq, health care, energy, ENDA) where the obstruction isn’t coming from the White House, so I can’t even console myself by saying, “just wait until 2009.” Sigh.

~ by Anna

Yesterday, I was distributing lit for Congresswoman Melissa Bean (D, IL-08) in a parade. Most people who declined to take one just waved me away or said, “No thanks.” However, one man told me, “I don’t like her, and I’m NOT INTERESTED.” Feeling particularly bold and sufficiently startled by his vitriol, I decided ask him why. He asked, “What’s her stand on immigration?” The congresswoman is a blue dog, and generally speaking stays on the harsher side of the illegal immigration debate. I told him that she viewed illegal immigration as a security concern and opposed it like most rational people, but that she supported legal immigration. The man took issue with the latter part of my statement and grumbled something to indicate the conversation was over. I thanked him for his time and opinion cheerfully, took pleasure in imagining myself flicking him off (the Bean shirt I was wearing prevented me from actually doing so) and ran to catch up with the rest of the caravan.

It reminded me of another incident, a couple of years ago. I was sitting in class the Friday before spring break, and the teacher was realistic enough to know that we wouldn’t do actual work. Somehow, immigration came up in the conversation. My teacher said, “You know, sometimes I think that we should just close all the borders and not let anyone else come in this country. I mean, what claim do they have on it? We’d certainly be safer.” Many of my classmates nodded or voiced their enthusiastic assent. I raised my hand, and I said “That’s great, Mr. Nowak, but I personally think your class would be diminished without my presence.” My classmates laughed, and the conversation continued to other topics, but I was surprised and hurt that a teacher would feel comfortable saying that in a class with two immigrants and 5 first-generation students.

Immigration is an intensely personal issue for me. I’ve been ridiculously fortunate my entire life, and I am so aware of how much of that has to do with living in this country and not in Putin’s Russia. I also have a heightened awareness of how the illegal immigration problem has poisoned the national dialogue on immigration in general and the alarming xenophobic trends the public exhibits. More and more, people just say “immigrant” to talk about illegal aliens, and stigmatize those of us who did it the right way.

I have trouble understanding the nativism. I don’t see that there’s any significant difference between legal immigrants in 1607 in Jamestown, legal immigrants in the 1840s, legal immigrants in the 1890s and 1900s, and legal immigrants in the 1990s and today. I’m not an expert, but the man I talked to certainly didn’t look in the slightest like a Native American, so my bet is that somewhere along the line, someone in his family came here on a boat. I don’t see how we can draw an arbitrary line to distinguish between previous waves of immigrants and those trying to come here today.

The Swedish in New Amsterdam, the Irish in New York, the Germans in Pennsylvania, the Poles and Italians in Chicago, the Chinese and Japanese in San Francisco all faced attacks because they didn’t fit in to our white, anglicized, Protestant culture. They, too, created racial and cultural enclaves that provided social services and community for new arrivals. They formed a base for city bosses, political machines, and absolutely staggering corruption. And yet, who will say today that they diluted and destroyed our national identity?

They became part of the popular notion of American identity, even before the advent of mass media and a truly national popular culture. Today, with those benefits, it’s ridiculous to claim that immigrants are here in too great of numbers to assimilate. Economically, it’s an advantage to learn English, and that fact isn’t lost upon immigrants.Just look at the statistics for Spanish retention among successive generations of immigrants, via the good people at Language Log:

“In point of fact, though, all the evidence suggests that Hispanics are learning English very rapidly — more rapidly than the Germans and other groups did at the turn of the century. There’s also no evidence that the rate of Spanish retention is higher than the rate of retention for other groups. This was the clear finding of an extensive study by Alejandro Portes and Lingxin Hao of 5000 second-generation Hispanic children in San Diego & South Florida. Overall, they found that 95 percent of the children speak English well and that 40 percent speak no Spanish.”

It hardly seems necessary to list the accomplishments and contributions of immigrants. Suffice to say, I feel good in the company of Joseph Pulitzer, Harry Houdini, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, the Curies, Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, Niels Bohr, Charlie Chaplin, Andrew Carnegie, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, Alexander Hamilton, and that most American of icons- Bob Hope. I consider diversity an advantage. It has certainly been a boon for science, art, industrialization, and even constitutional law in this country, because having different perspectives and conflicting opinions promotes progress. According to the UN World Economic and Social Survey on international migration from 2004, immigrants have an average of 7.2 more years of schooling than those they leave behind. Even the low-skilled workers coming in from Mexico have an average of 1.2 more years of schooling than Mexican nationals who stay.

There is no immigrant invasion. No one is trying to steal or destroy this country, it’s a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. We’re just beneficiaries of the greatest, oldest, and noblest American tradition. Even if you were to justify somehow cutting off immigration, the attempt would be a waste of time. As Thomas Friedman so helpfully tells us, the world is flat and there’s no escaping global economic forces. As long as half of the world lives on less than a dollar a day and watches 300 million of us dying of our own gluttonous excesses, there’s going to be something of an urge to migrate.

That having been said, I don’t think that being American is one of those inalienable right endowed to all 6.6 billion people on Earth. I’m angered as much as anyone else, probably more, at illegal immigration in this country, especially programs that would provide a path to citizenship for illegal aliens in less then 10 years. I’ve been here almost 11 and I’m not eligible to apply for citizenship for another two years. The Washington Post has covered recently the backlog at the State Department in processing passports, which sometimes takes months. My family has friends who have been here on H-1 working visas, paying taxes, and living in limbo for 6-8 YEARS, waiting for review of their cases and resolution of their legal status. These people are bound to their employers. If their jobs are outsourced or they are laid off or fired, they have to be ready to leave the country within two weeks. They have to renew their work authorization every year, and they can be deported for traffic violations. Some of them are joking now that it’s probably easier to just go to Mexico and re-enter the country illegally than to wade through the bureaucracy of the the Immigration and Naturalization Services, now a part of the Department of Homeland Security.

It’s pretty telling that one of our first national immigration laws was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Emma Lazarus wasn’t entirely incorrect- “Give me your tired, your poor,your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, ” just provided those who preceded them like their looks. Our immigration laws trump even the tax code for that unique combination of complexity and stupidity that characterizes them. The system is still rooted in the worst, most paranoid parts of our nature. We shouldn’t even consider a guest worker program without also extensively reforming the existing immigration laws.

This 4th of July, let’s set aside our hysterics. While the President and Congress acknowledge the failure of their attempts to resuscitate the illegal immigration bill and Lou Dobbs pontificates about the imminent downfall of the middle class, let’s consider making it a little bit easier for our newest Americans, instead.

Hey Urbanagora. As my first official time posting, I’d like to thank Billy Joe for all the hot passionate love making that he used to convince me to write on the blog and Augur for watching and video taping. Anyway, I thought you could all use a fun diversion from the hard work of reading blogs and arguing, so I decided to post the IMMIGRATION GAME!!!

It’s a nifty little thing created by the New York Times that gives you about ten fields you can manipulate to try and get a score of over 40 to qualify for immigration under the Kennedy bill that’s currently in the Senate. You’ll notice that almost none of the types of workers we currently seem to need most, that is, unskilled workers willing to work for low wages, will ever make it in under the Kennedy system. Enjoy!

Hugs n’ Kisses Billy

~Hanno