…It’s unclear how the latest incarnation of immigration legislation will finally emerge or if in an election year whether any will. The compromise Senate bill stalled as the Congress adjourned for their Easter brake. Debate will resume when Congress returns, and if the Senate bill passes, which appears likely but not certain, it will then have to be reconciled in conference committee with the House. It won’t be easy and may not happen this year. The debate was heated in both Houses, and when the conference committee meets to produce a final bill, it’ll resume again for sure. In the end the current “reform” (always code language for annulling our rights) effort may emerge stillborn. The 109th Congress may just kick it down the road to the 110th and let them deal with a very contentious issue that could easily be solved if we had enough legislators who believed in equity and justice instead of politics as usual liberally seasoned with race hate, demonization and blame the victim…
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Note: This is the third of a five-part series.
With the end of the cold war and along with it the great “red scare” and evil empire” of that period, the US was desperate to find new enemies. How else could we justify a high level of military spending and homeland security and readiness unless we could scare the public enough to accept it. It’s happened so often before you’d think people would have caught on by to it by now – but you’d be wrong. When our political leaders need an excuse to pursue some awful public-unfriendly agenda for their own private reasons and benefit, they need a good excuse to convince us to go along. They’ve found the best way most often is by inventing a threat, hyping it to scare us to death, and then declaring war on it. It seems to work every time so why not keep doing it. We’ve had a “war on drugs” for over 30 years, and in the 1980s Ronald Reagan “fought” that one, the “cold war” and made it a trifecta by declaring a war on “international terrorism.” In the 1990s the “cold war” was just a memory, the “war on drugs” continued to lock up mainly our poor and black population, the “war on international terrorism” was shortened to a “war on terrorism” and we added a new war to keep it in threes – the one on immigrants which this essay is about and is very much connected to our so-called but phony “war on terrorism.”
First some numbers based on Census Bureau data. That bureau estimates the nation’s foreign-born immigrant population (legal and illegal) reached a record high of 35 million in March, 2005. Their data also indicate the first half of the current decade has been the highest five year period of immigration in our history. Between January, 2000 and March, 2005 they estimate 7.9 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) entered the country, 3.7 million of whom they believe came illegally. Their data also shows that between March, 1995 and March, 2000 the foreign-born population grew by 5.7 million or about 1.1 million a year and between 2000 and 2005 an additional 5.2 million immigrated here or about 1 million + a year. Census 2000 also estimates between 8 – 11 million immigrants were living in the country illegally. It’s likely up around the higher number now or even more.
Hispanics now are the single largest and fastest growing ethnic or minority group in the country according to the Census Bureau. They number over 41 million or nearly 14% of the population surpassing blacks at about 40 million or 13.4%. The Bureau projects that by 2050 the Hispanic population of the US will reach 102.6 million or 24% of the total. In large and dominant states like California and Texas the totals are even more dramatic with Hispanics numbering about one third of the population and rising. And in no other major city is this trend more prominent than in Los Angeles which is now or shortly will be a majority Hispanic city.
THE WAR ON IMMIGRANTS ON THREE FRONTS NOW BEING WAGED IN THE CONGRESS
The current legislation that’s now passed the House and a different version so far unpassed in the Senate promises to wage an unholy war against three classes of immigrants primarily – the undocumented ones already here, (especially those of color), those coming or wishing to from Mexico from where they can walk or wade across the border plus their Central American cousins, and all Muslims (again especially those of color) from anywhere including those from Arab countries who aren’t white enough. Since 9/11 all Muslims, including the ones living here legally, are clearly public enemy number one. But those dark-skinned Latinos desperate to escape the catastrophic poverty from US imposed “neoliberal free market” trade policies aren’t far behind. If anything passes close to its current House form, it will create a legalized racially stereotyped underclass of Untermenschen (subhumans) subject to legalized felony scapegoating. The result will be a living hell for the millions affected and be as far-removed as can be imagined from the 1960s civil rights legislation that tried undo centuries of injustice and persecution of black people and all others long denied their equal rights.
It’s unclear how the latest incarnation of immigration legislation will finally emerge or if in an election year whether any will. The compromise Senate bill stalled as the Congress adjourned for their Easter brake. Debate will resume when Congress returns, and if the Senate bill passes, which appears likely but not certain, it will then have to be reconciled in conference committee with the House. It won’t be easy and may not happen this year. The debate was heated in both Houses, and when the conference committee meets to produce a final bill, it’ll resume again for sure. In the end the current “reform” (always code language for annulling our rights) effort may emerge stillborn. The 109th Congress may just kick it down the road to the 110th and let them deal with a very contentious issue that could easily be solved if we had enough legislators who believed in equity and justice instead of politics as usual liberally seasoned with race hate, demonization and blame the victim.
It’s very clear what the new law would look like if the so-called House Sensenbrenner bill ever makes it on the books – HR 4437, The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005. I love the sweet-sounding language they always use that usually conceals a horror beneath it. In the case of HR 4437 it’s even worse than that. For me and at my age, it’s hard to believe anything like it could be passed by even a single branch of the Congress. But I said the same thing about the USA Patriot Act that passed both Houses quickly and overwhelmingly (only one honorable senator voted against it) and was signed into law about as fast as you could say bombs away. No one in Congress had time to read it or likely even skim it.
Like its Patriot Act cousin, HR 4437 is a bill out of the bowels of hell that only tyrants, racists and hatemongers of all stripes could love. It criminalizes anyone in the country without documentation. Under current law that’s a simple civil violation and often or generally ignored when those affected work for agribusiness that wants them or the Walmarts of the world that do as well. Under the neofascist House bill, 11 million or so undocumented workers already here would be legal felons and subject to immediate detention and deportation with little if any recourse through the courts. It would break up and destroy families. The children born here are US citizens and could stay (supposedly, but don’t count on it). Their undocumented parent or parents could not. And should those deported decide to return and get caught, it would impose mandatory minimum prison sentences for them and anyone else judged to be promoting illegal entry.
The bill would also make it a felony subject to five years in prison for anyone giving aid and comfort to the undocumented like food and water or desperately needed medical care. There’s a whole lot longer list of nightmarish provisions in this monstrosity including building 698 miles of five double-layer apartheid wall segments along the Mexican border with California and Arizona (shades of Israel in the Occupied Territories where the intent is to steal Palestinian land and destroy innocent lives or the Berlin Wall). The Senate bill would pass on a physical barrier and impose a virtual one instead consisting of surveillance cameras, sensors and other monitoring equipment. Both bills call for measures to increase border security. The House version would do it by increasing the size of a Gestapo-like Border Control force 60-fold to 663,546 (that’s one third larger than the active duty US Army excluding reservists and National Guard). These “border guards” will be little more than armed thugs legally mandated to do about anything they want because acting tough and terrorizing are terrific deterrents, and they’d only be doing it to poor dark-skinned folks we don’t want who don’t count for anything anyway.
This huge army, if it’s created, already has a volunteer border force in place called the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC) or “Minutemen” for short. Their name is sacrilegiously borrowed from those “ready in a minute men” that go back in our history to the mid-1600s and were trained to be first on the scene to defend us in a conflict. All this force wants to defend is white supremacy and race hate. It’s an ultra-right neofascist group possibly numbering in the thousands of Nazi-like paramilitary street thugs now terrorizing anyone they catch trying to cross our borders and enter the country illegally, primarily in the Southwest. Other organizations are just as extremist like the National Policy Institute that believes the rights of white people come first, “diversity” and “multiculturalism” are practically sinful, Affirmative Action should be abolished and mass deportation is the solution to our “illegal immigrant problem.” These groups and organizations are being tacitly supported by our elected officials through their silence or in too many cases their complicity. Let’s be clear and call all these groups and their members what they are – white supremacist racist nationalists or simply hatemongers for short.
In the US today, this is what’s going on to compound the existing horror from the sort of domestic equivalent of this bill, the USA Patriot Act, for those of us here legally. There’s a sinister idea behind all this legislation, other oppressive laws already on the books and a government in charge that believes it can do whatever it wants about anything to anyone, law or no law. We have a president who believes and has said he’s “above the law” and the “Constitution is just a goddamed piece of paper.” With that kind of attitude, should it surprise anyone that what’s now happening is a full-scale effort to create a repressive national security police state with the consent of the public that’s scared of its shadow and willing to sacrifice its freedom for the illusion of security. In reality, the Bush administration is trying to “keep the legal and illegal rabble in line” while their quest for empire goes on unobstructed and unabated by waging permanent war on all parts of the world we haven’t yet conquered and colonized.
Coming in Part 4 on Monday, May 8: Guest Worker Program – A Return of the “Braceros”
Written by Stephen Lendman, (email – lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net) who lives in Chicago. Stephen maintains a blog at http://sjlendman.blogspot.com, and writes a regular column at www.populistamerica.com
