Senate Passes Immigration Reform, House Conservatives Snarl

With the US Senate finally passing their "comprehensive" immigration reform bill, we've moved a bit closer to a showdown between the ultraconservatives and pretty much everyone else. Somehow we're supposed to be happy that the House bill is "just a negotiating position." If that's the case, the Senate may already have given up too much. It is a sign of how crazy things are that the "pragmatic" approach calls for deporting around 1 million people.

But I'm nothing if not pragmatic. And I think it's worth reposting the statement of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights on this matter:

With this bill (S 2611), the Senate has fundamentally recognized that our nation needs the hard work that immigrants perform; that mass deportations are both impossible and un-American; and that the only solution to our broken immigration laws is to reduce immigration backlogs, reunite families, and offer a path for undocumented immigrants to earn legal status and eventually become citizens.

As currently written, however, the Senate bill contains many unworkable and even counterproductive provisions:

· Creating three categories of the undocumented based on length of stay would leave millions of immigrants out of the process, subjecting them to harsh enforcement procedures that would drive them further underground and beginning the problem all over again, and would encourage massive document fraud.
· The 370 miles of border fence, costing $1 million a mile, would be an expensive and offensive symbol, one that would be particularly ineffective when 40- 45% of the undocumented in the U.S. arrive here legally with visas.
· Federalizing local police departments to enforce immigration laws would guarantee that immigrants will not report crimes or serve as witnesses.
· Eliminating judicial discretion and humanitarian exceptions to deportation cases would guarantee the brutal separation of families in the future.

The Senate bill now goes to a Conference Committee to be reconciled with the House bill, HR 4437. The bill could become substantially better--or substantially worse. As the Senate debate indicates, no workable reform can pass without a majority of Democratic support. We urge Speaker Hastert and the House Republicans to reach out to Democrats to craft a workable solution, and to ensure that the Conference Committee improves this bill. If the unworkable portions of the legislation are not fixed, then we will work to defeat it.

Senate Moves on Immigration "Reform"

The LA Times is reporting that Republicans and Democrats in the US Senate have reached a compromise on immigration reform.  The key for Dems was the question of who would be on the Senate negotiating team when the bill goes into conference with the House's punitive bill that would make felons of undocumented migrants, their families, friends, and churches.

According to the Times Ted Kennedy says of his bill "Business and labor, Democrats and Republicans, religious leaders and
the American people strongly support our plan to strengthen borders,
provide a path to earned citizenship for those undocumented workers who
are here and put in place a realistic guest worker program for the
future."

As far as labor goes, that's not completely true.  The AFL-CIO opposes the Kennedy-McCain bill while Change to Win supports it.  Last weekend at the Labor Notes conference in Detroit I listened to a lawyer for the AFL-CIO explain their opposition, which boils down to 1) opposition to generalizing guest worker  programs beyond their traditional sectors (temporary agricultural work and high tech workers) and 2) the fact that the conference process with the House's bill will likely result in a really, really bad deal.

Other AFL-CIO and CtW representatives noted repeatedly that polls show that 60% of union members are opposed to liberalization of immigration laws.  Washington Post has an article to check out on immigrants who now favor strict immigration restrictions.
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Following up on the protests:  the Village Voice has a good collection of stories on immigration and the recent protests.  See their special sections tagged protest and immigration.
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In other news, turns out the NSA has been keeping tabs on all phone calls made in the US, not just international calls as previously admitted.  Prez. Bush, the valiant defender of civil liberties, is defending the program as a necessary antiterror measure. See reports in NY Times, Washington Post.

Conservative Victim Mongering

Every once in a while I feel the need to read George Will.  Not sure why.  Parenting has really cut down my Sunday-morning political show watching, so I don't get my fix there anymore.  Just crazy, I guess.

Anywhoo, the odd title "Condescensional Wisdom" caught my eye today on the Washington Post site.  This ought to be interesting, especially since few are more condescending than George Will.  Well, what you get is a snide obit for economist John Kenneth Galbraith who died recently.  Galbraith was an advisor to JFK, and a "liberal" economist in the sense that he wasn't an apologist for capital (for a more friendly obit go here).  Unlike other economists, Galbraith seems to have actually known something about what it's like to be an actual person, not just a quantifiable abstraction.

So obviously, George Will isn't going to like him.  But do we really have to slag on the dead, George?  So what if William F. Buckley was a better downhill skier! (you have to read it)

What really struck me about this "opinion" piece is the following passage, referring to Galbraith and other critics of 1950s American advertising culture: 

"Americans were what modern liberalism relishes -- victims , to
be treated as wards of a government run by liberals. It never seemed to
occur to Galbraith and like-minded liberals that ordinary Americans
might resent that depiction and might express their resentment with
their votes."

Conservatives like to whip out the "liberals love victimhood" line.  And it ocurred to me as I read George Will do it for the gazillionth time that Conservatives actually like to be victims.  They nurture their sense that they are ordinary folk who have been wronged by elitist Liberals.  Please, George Will is not one of the ordinary folk.  This is just the latest version of the frontier narrative about hapless white settlers being attacked by vicious Indians (e.g., "Custer's Last Stand," a.k.a., the Battle of Little Bighorn).   Aggressors like to portray themselves as righteous victims.

I rant, I rant.

Day After M1: A Look at the Papers

Well the big day has come and gone.  Massive protests in LA, Chicago, New York.  A veritable general strike.  How's the media doing with it?  Not so well.

Maybe it's just naive to think that something as big as these protests will be the number one headline on NPR the next day.  After all, yesterday's noon NPR report was from Phoenix--reporting that the human chain demonstration there had been cancelled for "safety reasons."  That was it--nothing about the hundreds of thousands of people marching at that very moment in Chicago.

But still, I was a little shocked with this morning's 8 AM headlines on Morning Edition started with ... the resignation of Italy's Prime Minister!  Okay, sure, that's an important story, and it's good for American media to highlight international news.  But come on!  Perhaps a million people on the streets in one day?  Sorry, doesn't make the lead story.  Somebody at NPR is chicken.

So how are the online newspapers doing?  New York Times:  Berlusconi leads, immigrant protests below the "fold."  Washington Post:  Bird Flu is #1 story, immigrants #2 ("Although the protests caught the nation's attention, the economic impact was mixed, as many immigrants heeded the call of some leaders
not to jeopardize their jobs, and businesses adopted strategies to cope
with absent employees.").  Alternatively, Slate has a piece by historian Nelson Lichtenstein on the significance of May Day. 

The Chicago Tribune's front page downplays the march, but there is some content.  Eric Zorn's blog is a bit goofy.  He can't figure out what the immigrants want until he sees a 13 year old girl with a t-shirt that says "Don't Take Away My Dream."  He concludes, America is "a nation of laws, it's true, but we're also a nation of
dreams--the greatest such nation ever. And our laws should reflect that."  True enough.  The Trib's editorial is similarly middle of the road, calling on the Senate to act on "the emerging American consensus on immigration reform"--i.e., some mix of crackdown, amnesty, and guest worker program.

Not surprisingly, the LA Times has the best coverage on the issue.  They lead with "Next Challenge:  Converting Protests to Political Clout."  And they have a series of photo galleries, and a series of related articles.

As usual, the best stories on on Indymedia sites.  LA Indymedia has great photographs, and an interview with the leader of the port truck drivers who claim to have organized a 90% effective strike.



The most bizarre thing I heard last night--did I hear this right?--Bush commented on the boycott saying something like "we don't want to lose our soul."  How's
that for antiworker opinion.  Go on strike, lose your soul.  Did anyone else hear that?