A line too long: no choice but action on ‘Broken immigration system’

A year ago, according to the State Department, there were 4.3 million people with family sponsored visa requests. The latest bulletin from Foggy Bottom says that the last family visas for siblings it was considering from Mexico were applied for in February, 1997. For married children of U.S. citizens, the last visas approved for Mexicans were applied for in November, 1993. If you are a citizen and want a visa for your sister in the Philippines, the last visas granted were for people who applied in May, 1991! 

And just because someone applied for a visa back then doesn’t mean they are next on the list, because only a limited number of employment based and family requested papers are available every year to applicants from each country. 

“The idea that the people can simply get in the back of the line is a little bit simplistic in practice,” Madeleine Sumption, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan immigration policy think tank supported by philanthropic and government policy advocacy groups, told the Fiscal Times, this past spring.

Read the post

Real crisis at border is one of American conscience

From Flickr/Public Domain

Angry White people screaming at busloads of minority children should frighten any American with a knowledge of our own recent history. Voices of fear and bigotry have risen like an oily mess on the tides that have brought waves of young immigrant children across our borders.

The boys and girls are buoyed ashore by a 2008, George W. Bush signed law - the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act - that is supposed to protect them from the rampant dangers of murder and sex trafficking in their home countries. You have likely heard, by now, that the GOP has wrongly hung this on Obama, citing his executive action that delayed deportation of minors that were brought here by their parents, as children, as the reason for the sudden influx. But the law and the president's order are distinct issues.

That law says we cannot turn them directly around, without detention and a deportation hearing, unless they are citizens of Mexico or Canada. Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans (as well as the rest of the world) all have the opportunity for due process, allowing them to stay in this country until they have their day in court. In a small number of cases, the administration has said, they will be allowed to stay.

Republicans in Congress have fought against giving President Obama the nearly $4 billion he asked for to help expedite hearing the cases. Instead, they are looking at a much smaller bill, that includes rescinding the human rights exemption in the 2008 law for non-contiguous, near border states, so that the refugee children can be returned to their home countries as if they were refugees from Mexico (or Canada). The Senate bill, which was endorsed by the administration Monday, also cuts the amount of money by about a third, but does nothing to reverse the policy of treating the children like the asylum seekers they are.

Here's the insidious part, though. The "humanitarian crisis" (perhaps an overly appropriated diagnosis of a plethora of refugee issues) the act was meant to address is now being framed by Republicans as the children risking their lives to cross our borders, and what to do with them once they get here.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE>>>

Rounding up the Roma in Europe's Arizona

"A disgrace." That's what the European Union Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding called France's continuing deportation of thousands of Roma (part of a group commonly known as Gypsies) to Romania.

France claims the ethnic minority, who mostly live in poverty in more than 300 camps across the country, are disproportionally responsible for a high number of crimes and criminal behavior. France has expelled the Roma before, but the latest wave follows an attack by Roma on a police station, in reaction to a young woman from a local camp being shot and killed by police.

What makes this episode particularly vile, is the leaking of a memorandum that was issued in the beginning of August, calling for a "systematic action to dismantle the illegal camps, in priority those of the Roma." Furthermore, to the EU's dismay, French officials have insisted that they are working "in favor of the Roma population."

"We can improve the situation of the Roma," said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, "who are at the heart of our concerns and our action."

So the French are uprooting thousands of individuals, putting them on buses and airplanes back to the discrimination they will face in Bulgaria and Romania in order to "improve the situation" for them.

The French Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, defended the action, saying the deportations are happening "not because they are Roma, but because they (the camps) are illegal." Remind you of anything?

The refrain in Arizona, and elsewhere, is that the anger over illegal immigration is over the "illegal" part, and not racism. This despite the fact that the most vocal anti-immigrant groups are the ones worried about White people becoming a minority, those who see the US defined as a nation run by Europeans.

The EU's Reding pegged it Tuesday, when she said, "This is a situation I thought Europe would not have to witness again after the Second World War." In World War Two, Vichy France was notoriously complicit in rounding up Jews and Gypsies and sending them to Nazi death camps.

So what's going on here? The French have decided that because they are French, they cannot possibly be racist. Everything they are doing - expelling the Roma, outlawing the burqa for Muslim women - they are doing for their minority populations, not to them. N'est pas?

-PBG

Supremacy is not tyranny - it's in the Constitution

Arizona's SB 1070 and why the feds are suing to stop it

"S.B. 1070 is invalid under the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution and must be struck down." (from the US Department of Justice complaint, United States v. State of Arizona (et al), dated: July 6, 2010)

Like a hole in an Arizona border fence, the lack of comprehensive, US immigration reform has left what Latino advocates call a "void," into which Arizona has inserted SB 1070. "Immigration policy and enforcement falls squarely upon the federal government, and the lawsuit will ensure to reassert federal authority," Jerry Gonzalez, of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, said in a statement issued after the DOJ announced the suit.

Any reform, Constitutionally, must come from the federal government, and not just in a way that pleases industry and appeases xenophobes. Indeed, watering down the law to cater to those groups is an abandonment of the charitable principles that, so proudly, we hail ourselves for every time we give our stuff to the Salvation Army and see a picture of the Statue of Liberty.

A government that is committed to the interests of its people operates dysfunctionally if it ignores the interests of the global community of which it is a member. Allowing states to make their own law irrespective of existing federal statute not only potentially disrupts the integrity of US international relations, it violates the Constitution.

The Supremacy Clause of Article VI in the United States Constitution says the "Constitution, and the Laws of the United States... shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and ... every State shall be bound thereby."

In the view of the Department of Justice, The Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of State, Arizona's controversial new immigration law violates this clause because - among other things - it "interferes with the numerous interests the federal government must balance when enforcing and administering the immigration laws and disrupts the balance actually established by the federal government."

The agencies involved feel that any step Arizona - or any state - takes to amend or rewrite federal immigration law, may jeopardize treaties and other federal laws with regard to the safety and security of the entire country. Specifically, the brief says, "Arizona’s immigration policy exceeds a state’s role with respect to aliens (Homeland Security), interferes with the federal government’s balanced administration of the immigration laws (Justice), and critically undermines U.S. foreign policy objectives (State)."

This follows what the Supreme Court decided in 1941, Hines [Secretary of Labor and Industry for Pennsylvania] v. Davidowitz, et al. "Our primary function," the court said, "is to determine whether... [state] law stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress. And in that determination, it is of importance that this legislation is in a field which affects international relations, the one aspect of our government that from the first has been most generally conceded imperatively to demand broad national authority."

Even though "the status quo perpetuates a broken immigration system," as GALEO's Gonzalez said, there is still federal immigration law already in place. Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano insisted that DHS will "continue to enforce the laws on the books."

Arizona's law, therefor, is an example of a state acting on its own to change a law which every other state must follow. "Seeking to address the issue through a patchwork of state laws," Attorney General, Eric Holder, said in the DOJ press release, "will only create more problems than it solves.”

Gonzalez agreed, saying that in the case of the state his organization represents, the Justice Department action "should give pause to the Gubernatorial candidates talking about enacting or pushing for such a law in Georgia."

Napolitano also said that, as Governor of Arizona she "vetoed several similar pieces of legislation" because, she believed they "undermined the vital trust between local jurisdictions and the communities they serve.”

The lawsuit is important because it says that in our democratic society, though we speak with different voices, and often a disquiet consensus, we still believe in the supremacy of the rule of law - one nation. E pluribus unum.

-PBG