Wed 30 May 2007
Immigration reform is in the news. Let’s find an Eph connection!
How about here ?
It’s obvious to Julian Lazalde ['04], 24, of Pilsen why many immigrants come to the U.S. and want to stay. When he visits the part of north central Mexico his parents came from, he imagines himself in a subsistence farmer’s life of hard labor and poverty.
Instead, Lazalde is a graduate of Williams College in Massachusetts, and an organizer for the Resurrection Project, a Pilsen-based organization of local churches working on affordable housing and community political issues.
“I wouldn’t be here if my parents didn’t think there was something better for me,” he said.
…
Lazalde has been working with a group of community residents who helped register nearly 1,000 new Hispanic voters from their neighborhoods in the November elections. They have now turned their sights to immigration reform at both the state and national level.
The Resurrection Project is planning continued pressure on legislators who are on the fence on immigration reform initiatives such as the recent bill allowing for drivers’ certification for undocumented immigrants in Illinois.
Even legislators who are supportive of immigrant rights in predominantly immigrant districts get more calls against immigrant rights than in favor, Lazalde said several politicians had told him.
“We’re doing all we can to balance out those numbers,” Lazalde said.
It is a huge struggle to help immigrants become citizens, register to vote and stay politically involved, he said. The threat of deportation is a two-edged sword that can galvanize support or keep people hiding in fear, Lazalde said.
“People who are undocumented feel like they can’t do anything,” he said.
Uh, yeah. Just like American citizens feel when they visit Mexico.
Anyway, good luck to Lazalde! If the McCain-Kennedy Bill passes, then the US will have millions of new citizens, the vast majority without college degrees. That’s good for Williams graduates since the prices of the services they buy (yard work, manufactured goods, cleaning services) will go down while the prices of services they provide (legal, medical, consulting, business) will stay the same. We get richer!
Current US citizens without a Williams degree? Not so much.
Note the immigration reform will not allow foreigners to compete with us or other members of the US elite. A construction worker from Mexico will be able to replace a construction worked from the US as soon as McCain-Kennedy passes. A doctor or lawyer from Mexico will still be forbidden from practicing his trade, unless he goes through a residency and/or schooling all over again. Wouldn’t want doctor salaries to go down, would we?
Recommended reading on this topic here, here and here. Alas, those links are not as ideological diverse as one might like. Please suggest other readings in the comments.
May 30th, 2007 at 10:52 am
I don’t think Dave is exactly right here.
Most of the “millions of new citizens” Dave claims would result if the current bill passes are people who are already here, so its unclear (at least to me), how that will affect the labor pool significantly.
Also, under the current proposal, we are more likely to admit more highly educated immigrants (engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc.), than under current law.
The real questions to me are (a) are we capable of making it more difficult to immigrate here illegally (and willing to take whatever steps are necessary, however morally distasteful they might be), and (b) are we capable of setting up and administering a system which can process immigrants in anything approximating an efficient way.
If we can’t answer “yes” to both questions (and actually succeed in implementing them), arguing about the details of the immigration bill is as reasonably pointless. I’m not sure we can answer “yes” to either question.
May 30th, 2007 at 11:24 am
I am unsurprised by how little David knows about this issue, to the degree that he gets the name of the bill, and the bill number wrong. The McCain Kennedy bill was from the last Congress.
The current bill being debated is the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Reform Act, or the “grand compromise” or S. 1348.
And btw, McCain has more or less been running as far as he can from the bill that used to bear his name. With a pirouette or two to look back.
For more nuanced information on the bill, I’d suggest the National Immigration Forum (http://immigrationforum.org/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=879)
which is a coalition of businesses, immigrant rights groups, and religious groups.
The NYTimes has some info on the bill and a poll that shows a majority of those polled support a path to legalization:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/washington/22bill.html?ex=1180670400&en=8c94f9a1c4a1a7ab&ei=5070
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/25/us/25poll.html
See also this LA Times article: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-immig28may28,1,6627294.story?coll=la-headlines-politics&ctrack=1&cset=true
Apparently the employment-based points system is something cooked up by the folks over at the Heritage Foundation.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Nations were formed around a common culture, same language, related races, similar communities, shared political values and communal religious beliefs. Diversity was viewed in the character of each individual country. Today it has come to mean the practice of obliterating the unique nature of an established society and substituting an amalgamation of the ‘melting-pot community’.
The “Open Borders” idea is a form of regional and Pan-American hemispheric homogenization. The union has no longer a common purpose. The forces that drive bureaucratic conformity are using their continent wide authority to accomplish their preliminary objectives. Dissolution of the union now appears to be inevitable. The opportunity to re-establish rightful authority and sovereignty of the individual independent states has been undermined.
Our American values and strong tradition of individual freedom and liberty is not the shared experienced that the political class wants to preserve. We have no national identity. Through the good work of these last several decades of ‘do gooders(?)’, we now have little left in common and even less desire to assimilate into or accept our traditional society.
Resistance is met with indifference where obstacles come under the their plan for total integration. Diversity is the real agenda of our globalists who wish to break down traditional heritages and merge everyone under the guidance of some central authority.
Yes we can fill our schools like Williams College with these new found immigrants and vest them with diplomas to enact these policies that destroy the common bonds of national unity and thus the ‘Nation State’.
Immigration is but an instrument of the disintegration of native peoples and nation states. For example, we enact environmental laws to deny cultivation of our soils so that specific species of rats can dominate our fields while our pasture is left to lay fallow or better yet rot.
Go Ephs!!!
May 30th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll
May 30th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Anon 7:05 is wrong on so many counts: economic, historic, sociological, etc. that I will leave it to those in particular fields to eviscerate particular aspects of the argument.
As for the economic, the concept of “our soils” and “our fields” is meaningless in some cultures, including our native American cultures. Quite proudly, Wisconsin was the home of both Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Gov. Nelson–the birthplace of the stewarding movement. We do not need to farm every square acre of land. The world produces more than enough food to comfortably feed its population. The problem is moving food from where it is produced to where people need it. In light of this, we should use what is needed and protect what is not. It is not only a value judgment, but as one can readily witness with fish stocks, good economic sense.
May 31st, 2007 at 12:53 am
Richard,
We are (finally) getting some US coverage of the impact of US trade policy on sectors of the Mexican economy , primarily of the agricultural sectors in relation to the coming update of the agricultural subsidies bill, and the usual “threats of globalization” and “free trade” mantras.
The second (of many) problems with the immigration bill is that it is based on the implicit premise that current immigration from Mexico is “more of the same” of the patterns of the past century, when it is in fact a unique historical development of the past decade or so, predicated on the collapse into recession of large sectors of the Mexican economy and factors ranging from rising ungovernability of many areas, infrastructural collapse and the withdrawal of international economic investment and activity. Not to mention the political and political economic realities that have created this disaster.
I begin to wonder if I sound (more) like a broken record (than usual): debt and spending are not under control, petroleum resources are increasingly moving to crisis point (and exhaustion), the public/private benefits, pensions, and perks systems are all follies that cannot be preserved– and all the opportunities to renegotiate them and right the ship ship of state before disaster seem to be slipping between our fingers.
The first error of the immigration bill is its construction largely in private, without broad national discussion.
The third error (closely parallel to the first) is the lack of bilateral negotiations and understanding between our nations, and the stale face-off between executive elites and lack of true co-operation. “anonymous” complains about the eradication of so-called “national” borders as if everything were already fait accompli: the problem is that the nation-state, national sovereignty model is failing both nations as we transition to what has been variously (and probably quite poorly) described as “global economy”, “post-national capitalism,” and so forth.
The United States’ “elites” hardly seem to understand that Mexico’s planners want its population and workforce back: Mexico needs them to build any future economy (as much as Mexico needs payments from abroad and needs to wean itself from dependence on those payments). There’s an irony to the United States’ building a “wall” against emigration from Mexico: it’s somewhat as if Western Europe had initiated and paid for the construction of a barrier to prevent Eastern European emigration to the the Western economies.
The problem in this being: socialist, non-democratic economies fail whether they lock their workers in or not.
Problems four through ten or so…
May 31st, 2007 at 1:59 am
To anonymous @7.05pm:
FUCK YOU!
May 31st, 2007 at 6:53 am
Do the people in charge in Mexico fail to appreciate, like the their U.S. counterparts, the simple proposition that the Mexican Everyman will vote with his economic feet almost no matter what you do, or threaten to do, to him?
May 31st, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Here, here Ken Thomas 93