They Didn't Ask For Signs

I think I love Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. Seriously. This video rules. Way to call out the Federal Government! Nice.

I Think I Love Jon Kyl

It was only a matter of time before it became apparent how ridiculous and clueless those on city councils and boards of supervisors are as they debate whether or not to impose some sort of idiotic boycott against Arizona for passing their illegal immigration enforcement bill. The only ones who seem to think that these boycotts are a good idea seem to be the members of the councils and the boards which are considering such lunacy. It's like they haven't read the bill at all. And in some cases, it's almost like they don't even know where Arizona is, either.

Let's go over to Milwaukee, Wisconsin and get to know Milwaukee County Supervisor Peggy West. Ms. West supports a boycott of doing business with Arizona. If only we knew what her logic for such support really was. Oh, wait! We DO!

Below, you'll find a video segment from last Thursday's meeting where Ms. West explains why she is in favor of boycotting Arizona. Here's the textual version of her reasoning (the video is so that you'll actually believe me when you read what she said, as it is almost unbelievable):

"If this was Texas...which is a state on the border with Mexico, and they were calling for a measure like this saying that they had a major issue with, you know, with undocumented people, flooding their borders, I would say, I would have to look twice at this. But this is a state that is a ways removed from the border and, um, it doesn't make sense to me that when you Google this subject, if you put in "Arizona SB 1070" that you see a picture of the Governor of Arizona meeting with President Obama in May of 2010. If you have direct linkage to the President, there are already National Guard troops on the border in Arizona." Wait. It's removed from....the border....with MEXICO?!?! But it's...but....she just....oh, never mind. Roll the clip....

Yep. See, if Arizona was a border state, then she'd understand what all of the hubbub was about. But since it's so NOT a border state, she doesn't get it. (And I don't get why that would matter. I guess in her mind, illegal immigrants only stay in border states? I really don't know.) And all of that stuff about Googling the law and seeing pictures of President Barry and the governor of Arizona? I don't know what that has to do with anything at all. I thought I was confused at her questionable geography skills, but that really threw me for a loop. (And by the way, I did Google "Arizona SB 1070" and my results showed NO pictures of President Barry and the governor of Arizona. In fact, the first image result that turned up for me was that fetching young lady in the lingerie right there. She is neither the governor of Arizona, NOR the President of the United States, so that's a little odd.)

But wait! It gets better! According to something called the Phoenix New Times, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl sent Ms. West a letter AND a MAP of the United States which highlighted that Arizona does, in fact, share a border with Mexico. The text of his letter to her is awesome. It reads in part: "You will be interested to learn that Arizona does indeed share a border with Mexico. I have enclosed a map for your convenience." Do we have the map, fellas? We do? Super. Behold!

Awesome. Completely awesome. And he follows up his awesomeness with even more awesomeness when he closes out his letter with: "I hope you will take the time to actually read the Arizona law before formulating an opinion about it and become familiar with our country's geography and the challenges that our border states face." Yeah. I think I'm a little in love with Jon Kyl.

Ms. West pretty much sums up what I've been thinking about all of these political windbags who are advocating and enacting boycotts against Arizona all along. They all seem to be a bunch of dimwits that wouldn't know their ass from a hole in the ground. And while I don't know anything about Jon Kyl, I know that anyone who sends that sort of letter to someone who deserves to receive it gets a few points in my book. (I'm really hoping that the guy isn't a total prick, because I'd really like to like him.)

Nebraska - The Next Arizona

As is the case with most days, I am confused. I'm confused because of a little town called Fremont, Nebraska. There aren't a lot of people in Fremont (and that's probably for good reason). Maybe around 26,000 is all. But when they went to the polls on Monday, at least 57% of the voters voted yes on a measure to help control illegal immigration. Hmm. That sounds vaguely familiar...

According to something called WOWT (which appears to be some sort of NBC affiliate), the measure does a couple of things. Thing One: "Before landlords can rent any home to a person in Fremont, that person must show a certificate obtained from the city. In order to get the certificate the person will have to prove they are in the United States legally." Ahhh. I like it. And I like Thing Two as well, which is that "The ordinance also requires Fremont employers to verify the legal residency status of people they hire." Sweet!

Way to go Fremont, Nebraska! You certainly are a plucky little town! What was the driving force behind such legislation? You liked won't be shocked to learn that "Supporters said they wanted the city to act because the Federal Government has failed to enforce immigration laws and because it has failed to secure the nation's borders." Hmmm. That sounds vaguely familiar as well...

In case you're missing the obvious correlation here, the Fremont, Nebraska law sounds surprisingly like what they're doing in Arizona. It's just making sure that there is some sort of verification of a person's legal residence in this country. And just like the rationale behind the Arizona law, Fremont, Nebraska is fed up with the Federal Government doing absolutely nothing to enforce immigration laws and secure our borders. And just like in Arizona, these things are FAR from crazy notions. However, what makes the Fremont, Nebraska law stand out from the Arizona law is that the Fremont, Nebraska law was voted on by the people.

That is the part that people who are against the Arizona law need to really pay attention to. So far, they've done a really good job of trying to ignore that, according to polling, 60% of the country and 70% of people in Arizona are all for these sorts of laws. And they could kind of trick themselves into thinking that those numbers didn't hold any weight because the Arizona law wasn't put to the voters. But the Fremont, Nebraska law was put to the voters. And the results were surprisingly close to what the poll numbers showed about the Arizona law; about 60% were in favor of it.

That brings me to my confusion. Why was there all of the hooplah and uproar over the Arizona law, but there isn't that same kind of outcry over the Fremont, Nebraska law? How come I haven't heard of people wanting to boycott Fremont? (Granted, there probably isn't much there to boycott in the first place, but I'm operating on the principle of thing here, so stay with me!) How come there aren't city council meetings far and away where they discuss boycotting Fremont, Nebraska? How come I haven't heard all of the cries of racism over Fremont, Nebraska? Is it because their law only requires some sort of documentation if someone wants something (ie, a place to rent), whereas the Arizona law allows for a general suspicion of someone being in this country illegally to warrant a request to see identity documents? I don't know. I don't get it.

If I had to guess, however, I would guess that it was because the law was enacted through a vote. It's hard to argue with what the voters want. Just look at South Carolina and ol' Alvin Greene, the Democratic Party's candidate for the Senate. The voters voted for him and he appears to be dumb as a post. That's apparently what they wanted (though it's extremely unclear as to why). Fremont, Nebraska passing this law simply reflects what the national polls do, and that is that people are frustrated with the federal government not doing anything to curb illegal immigration and so they're willing to vote on measures that will allow individual states to try and save themselves. And perhaps one of the best things that it can accomplish is maybe all of those people who continually complain about the Arizona law will start to pipe down. I'm all for any law that silences morons.

Mayoral Sanctioned Squandering

Many, many idiotic notions have been gaining steam lately. There is just a large segment of society that has embraced the asinine and gone with it. One of the more notable segments would be all of the lawmakers in various cities around the country who have voted to boycott Arizona because of their implementation of an immigration enforcement law that almost exactly mirrors federal law (but differs because it isn't as strict as federal law). Morons.

Now, listen...the last time that I checked, the majority of individual cities and states across this great nation of ours have enough problems of their own. They really don't need to be spending a lot of time worrying about what other states and cities are doing. They certainly don't need to be wasting both time and money on what other states are doing. So why in the world the Sacramento City Council was wasting their time and money on deciding whether or not to boycott Arizona (in opposition of their perfectly legal immigration enforcement law) is completely beyond me. That is, it was completely beyond me until I heard Mayor Kevin Johnson explain the rationale behind the asshattery that seems to be going on.

I realize that I should be providing a link for the quote below. But I can't find it. I had to transcribe it from the Hour 4 segment of the Armstrong & Getty Show podcast from yesterday (somewhere right around the 20:00 mark). Usually they have links to these sort of things, but yesterday they didn't. It's there, though. I swear it's there. I wouldn't mislead you. Much. But today, not at all. Here is what the mayor of Sacramento had to say about the allegations that passing such sanctions against Arizona is squandering and wasting taxpayer dollars. I hope you're sitting down.

"I would say that for those of us who believe that we squandered and wasted taxpayer dollars, um, I believe a threat, um, you know, an unjust law anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. But we squander taxpayer dollars at a lot of council meetings by wasting time on issues that are city issues. So I'd like to see us be much more efficient on the way we conduct ourselves. Not just on non-city issues, but certainly within the city of Sacramento." Wuck?!

That's right. Don't worry about the taxpayer dollars that were squandered just on the Arizona immigration law boycott because they squander taxpayer dollars all the freaking time! No worries! It happens all the time! They are completely inefficient at making the best use of taxpayer dollars! This is nothing new! Don't get yourself all in a wad over this! No big deal. It's a very every day occurrence. ::: sigh ::: I want to stab myself.

Does he realize that he admitted that the Arizona boycott was a "non-city issue"? That it is an issue that doesn't have anything to do with the city? Thus, the city shouldn't be doing anything about the issue, let alone squandering taxpayer dollars?! When I can finally locate the clip so that I can link to it, you'll have to hear how he laughs when he makes that statement. He thinks it's pretty funny that they're all a bunch of inefficient losers. Nice. Just what Sacramento needs leading it into doom. A funny man mayor. Great. Let's see how this whole boycott thing works out for you, Sacramento. Actually, with a mayor with that sort of attitude, let's just see how everything else works out for you. Enjoy your squandering!

Just Read The Law

Ready for this? You're not. Trust me. You know that awesome law they passed down there in Arizona? The one that, essentially, mirrors the federal laws on immigration enforcement almost exactly? Yeah, that's the one. The one in which, according to the Wall Street Journal, 70% of Arizonans favor, 60% of Americans favor, and 50% of Hispanics favor. That's the one. (Man, you sure wouldn't get the idea that those are the numbers in favor of it when all you hear about are people protesting it and boycotting Arizona...as if they are representing the majority, which they are clearly not.) That's the law I'm talking about.

Now, when this law passed, the Attorney General of the United States, a one mustachioed Eric Holder, was critical of the law and said that the federal government may challenge it because " Arizona's new law is subject to potential abuse", according to CBS News That same report also told use that there were "A number of options are under consideration including "the possibility of a court challenge," Holder said in response to questions on the Arizona law". The article also states that President Barry "...has instructed the Justice Department to examine the Arizona law". It also says that "The Justice Department and the Homeland Security Department are reviewing the state law." That was on April 27, 2010.

The law is ten pages long. Have you ever seen how these things are wrote up? For some reason, legislation is always written in a four inch wide column (if that) that has two inch margins on the top and bottom of the page. And it's always double-spaced. It might even be triple spaced. And it's not like it's a teeny-tiny font either. No, it's a fair sized font and they format the stuff on the page like it's a Reader's Digest Condensed Version for the Blind. You can read it from at least five feet away with no trouble at all....with dim lighting! The point here is that while it may be ten pages long, there are probably only 50 words on each page. (Mind you, the health care bill was over two thousand pages long.)

Fast forward to May 13, 2010 at some sort of hearing that Eric Holder was being questioned at. That's over two full weeks since Mr. Holder voiced his concern about this law. That's over two full weeks since we were told that "The Justice Department and the Homeland Security Department are reviewing the state law." That's over two full weeks since we were told that President Barry has instructed the Justice Department to check out the law. That would be the Justice Department that Eric Holder is technically over. Ten pages. Over two weeks. Do you see where this is going? Of course you do.

Mr. Holder has not actually read the law. That is correct. He hasn't read it. Now, I realize that being Attorney General of the United States is a job that would probably tend to keep you pretty busy. But if you're telling me that you can't read ten pages of legislation over the course of at least two weeks, then there's something wrong with you and I seriously question your ability to serve in the capacity for which you were appointed. My God, man, what's wrong with you?

According to Fox News it was during these hearings that a one Rep.Ted Poe, R-Texas (also now known as "my hero"), asked Holder if he had read the law. Holder responding weakly by stating, "I have not had a chance to -- I've glanced at it." Luckily Rep. Poe offered to give Mr. Holder his copy of the law. It's not like it's a difficult document to lay your hands on. Oh, but this gets better. Or worse. Hard to say. Hard. To. Say.

"When asked by Poe how he could have constitutional concerns about a law he has not read, Holder said: "Well, what I've said is that I've not made up my mind. I've only made the comments that I've made on the basis of things that I've been able to glean by reading newspaper accounts, obviously, television, talking to people who are on the review panel...looking at the law." Um, wait. What now?

He's going by what he has "been able to glean" from the freaking newspapers and television and talking to folks?! Why hasn't he just started consulting bloggers?! Or those folks at those rallies? Why don't you just read the freaking thing yourself?! He can read, right? I mean, I'm kind of assuming that's some sort of a qualification or a necessity in order to be the Attorney General of the most powerful nation on the planet, but I'm kinda starting to wonder.

It's not even so much that he hasn't read it that just burns my toast. It's that he is SO SURE that it MUST be racist or have this HUGE potential for abuse that he's already talking about challenging it in court! Hey, Mr. Holder! What say that before you go all full blown spending taxpayer money on some sort of legal challenge to something, how about you read the damned thing first, all right? Yes, I'm actually suggesting that you READ all ten pages! Hey, and while you're at it, why don't you compare those ten pages to the federal immigration laws on enforcement and see how much they differ?! Guess what? They're almost identical, you jackass.

While I'm glad that Rep. Poe brought this up and got him to admit that he hadn't actually read the law himself and was relying on the town crier to bring him up to speed, I really wish he had held his feet to the fire a little bit more and asked him WHY he hadn't read the whopping ten pages of legislation by now. That would have been great. It's times like these when I miss Tim Russert. He would have had Holder on Meet the Press and would have asked him why he didn't read it. I long for the days when there was at least one journalist out there that would do that. These days, however, we'd be lucky if someone were to ask Eric Holder why he has such a creepy moustache. :: sigh :: Yep, I miss Tim Russert. Heart disease kills, kids! Keep yourselves healthy.

This video here shows Eric Holder being interviewed by the adorable, extremely capable, and frequently scarf-wearing Jake Tapper. In it, Tapper asks him why he doesn't think that the Arizona immigration enforcement law is a good idea. Keep in mind that the answer that he gives is one that he has formulated based on what he's read in some newspapers and heard on TV. Below, you will find the video of Eric Holder at that hearing when he admits to Rep. Poe (still known as "my hero") that he hasn't read the whopping 10 page bill. I think it's somewhere around the 1:00 mark if you want to skip ahead. While I really like Rep. Poe, he tends to drone whenst speaking.

Los Morons

And the ridiculousness just keeps right on going in Arizona over their illegal immigration law (which is no different than the Federal immigration laws that have been in place for years). Only this time, it's taken a whole new twist. This time, we have the idiocy over protesting this new law and it has been combined with sports. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong with that sort of a combination, right?

See, according to ESPN, the NBA's Phoenix Suns wore " "Los Suns" on their jerseys in Game 2 of the Western Conference semifinals on Wednesday night." Uh, what? Now, if that kind of sounds like a language other than English, you'd be correct. That would be a touch of Spanish. Technically, I would have thought that the jerseys would have read "Los Soles", as "soles" is the plural of "sun" which is "sol", but if it's the name of a team or something like that, you leave it alone. Why you're allowed to Spanish-ize part of the name, but not the other part isn't exactly clear to me. But that's the reason why it was "Los Suns".

This ridiculous idea was the brainstorm of the owner (or propietario) of the Suns, Robert Starver. He said that it was "...to honor our Latino community and the diversity of our league, the state of Arizona, and our nation." Uh-huh. Never mind that you need to read, write and speak English to become a citizen. Never mind that language is one of the key elements that holds together a society. Never mind all of that. Go right on ahead with dividing people up into groups based upon race and not upon citizenship. What could possibly go wrong there?

See, when I first heard that they were going to do this, I wasn't all that concerned about it because I didn't think that there was any way in hell that David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA, would let it happen. You can't just make your jersey say whatever you want, can you? Apparently you can. That's because David Stern told NBA.com "We think it's appropriate what the Suns are doing." You do? How on earth is it appropriate for a sports team to make any sort of a political statement? You're not politicians. You're not activists. You're sports guys who get paid a ridiculous amount of money whether you win OR lose. If you want to express your dislike for the new law on your own time, that's your business. But for you to want to do it when you're at work? I have a hard time seeing how that's appropriate.

And I guess that I'm never going to understand how it's appropriate in the mind of David Stern because his mind clearly does not work like that of a sane individual. That's because, according to NBA Fanhouse, "...on Monday (Danny) Ainge tossed a towel skyward" during a playoff game. It didn't hurt anyone. It didn't obstruct any play or anything like that. But according to someone named Terrence Moore, Ainge was "spitting on the so-called "integrity of the game" -- which Stern and other commissioners of other leagues always say they must protect." Yep. And that's why Danny Ainge "...has been fined $25,000 for creating an unauthorized distraction and for conduct detrimental to the game." Wait. What now?

Danny Ainge gets fined $25,000 for throwing a towel in the air, but the Phoenix Suns are allowed to change their jerseys so that they read "Los Suns" and that's perfectly OK?! How is that NOT an unauthorized distraction? Is there some sort of clause in the NBA rules that says that making a political statement on the court is an authorized distraction? What a maroon.

I would like nothing more than for Phoenix Suns season ticket holders to give up their seats. Let those who are in the country illegally purchase them for next season and see how that turns out for them. I'm going to mention AGAIN that the majority of Arizona residents are in FAVOR of this legislation. It's not like it's unpopular amongst the masses or anything. It does seem, however, to be extremely unpopular amongst the uninformed and the clueless. That seems obvious.

On Immigration

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, for over a week I've been wanting to write about the issue US immigration, a contentious topic that has festered for years before exploding over a week ago, on April 23, when the GOP-dominated Arizona legislature passed one of the most extreme and extremely racist anti-immigrant laws the US has witnessed in decades. Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed it into law the next day.  To quote the New York Times, this law "would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad powers to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally." In fact, it basically requires them to do so if they suspect someone is in the country without documentation; in fact, Republican Congressman Tom Bilbray (CA) suggested, without irony, that you could tell undocumented immigrants by how they dress!

This element of the law particularly sparked a furor, leading to boycotts, yesterday's marches, withdrawals from the state's higher educational system, and cancelations of events scheduled to take place in Arizona, yet Brewer and those behind the law have claimed, in bad faith in my opinion, that it would not lead to racial or ethnic profiling. The White House, many leading Democrats and some Republicans have condemned the law, as has Mexico's government. The overly broad law caused such an uproar, in fact, that the Arizona legislature passed amendments, signed by Brewer this past Friday, that qualify the pretext for stopping potential suspects, requiring that it occur only if the police were enforcing a law or ordinance. Nevertheless, the ACLU and others note that the law still allows racial and ethnic profiling, while also making it a crime to live in or pass through the state without documentation (meaning that everyone had better have a passport, birth certificate, or other required government ID, such as proper visas on them, at all times). On top of this law, the Arizona Education department will now bar teachers with pronounced accents (!) or who speak ungrammatically from teaching classes for students still learning English, and is sending out auditors to evaluate teachers. While I do agree that people teaching English, especially English as a Second Language (ESL), should be able to convey standard, proper English-language grammar, the arbitrariness of this dictate smacks of yet more racism and ethnocentrism.  Yet another bill, pushed by Republican attorney general candidate Tom Horne, now the Arizona superintendent of public education, awaits Governor Brewer's signature: it aims to ban ethnic studies classes in public schools, and specifically any courses that promote the overthrow of the US; promote resentment toward a race or class of people; are designed primarily for pupils of a specific ethnicity; and advocate ethnic solidary instead of treating students as individuals. So inane and dangerous is this bill that it could bar American history classes that discuss not only the practice of genocide against Native Americans, the enslavement of African Americans, the mass deportation of Latinos under Herbert Hoover, and the internment of Japanese Americans, but the centuries-long political and economic disenfranchisement of White women or the White working class!

Yesterday all over the United States, people marched to protest the truly horrendous new Arizona law, which violates civil rights, human rights, and, as I imagine will be proved when legal challenges play out, the United States Constitution, but also to call attention to the attitudes behind it, and to push for comprehensive, fair, and forward-looking immigration reform.  The current muddle serves no one except powerful business interests, who benefit from open and unsecured borders, disempowered and undocumented workers, lower wages and salaries, and a government that talks out of both sides of its mouth.  This has got to change, and we must demand that the President and Congress, whether they have the courage or stomach for doing so, act instead of dithering and passing the problem down the road, so that it can be demagogued for the benefit of extremists. We're all harmed the longer this goes on.

Almost exactly four years ago on this blog I posted a longish series of thoughts on the immigration issue. (I've posted many times on the immigration issue, and searching the blog will pull these up.) Though we have a new administration, the issues remain almost the same as when George Bush was president, though the rhetoric has gotten harsher in some ways. We still are witnessing foot-dragging from the federal government, conflicting messages instead of policies that will benefit US citizens and undocumented immigrants, and a rhetorical vacuum that racialists and supremacists, many of them rooted in the Republican Party, freely take advantage of.  Here's what I wrote years ago (note the commentary about the anti-Latino component), and unfortunately, nearly all of it still is relevant.

Thoughts on the Current Immigration Discussion (2006)

Today, over 1 million immigrants and their supporters rallied across the country, in cities from Atlanta to New York (the photo at left is from the Washington rally, Evan Vucci/AP). My own thoughts on the immigration issue are simple and may be naïve, but here they are:

1) All of the immigrants who are already here should be offered a simple and clear path to naturalization. The INS (or whatever it's called now) should address the problem of anyone who has serious criminal convictions (and I don't mean traffic violations or marijuana possession) here or in their native country, but in general, everyone else should be given a clear and realizable opportunity to become a citizen. All. Of. Them. The last I looked, all of the nativist Republicans in the House or Senate who were pushing for draconian penalties against the immigrants (Sensenbrenner, Tancredo, etc.) were descended from European immigrants, some of whom arrived no more than a century ago (and in many cases were given all kinds of opportunities at the expense of Native Americans and African-Americans), and some of whose ancestors were the objects of harsh anti-immigration sentiment and actions. How quickly and completely they forget.

2) If most Americans are concerned with the economic impact of uncontrolled immigration, and studies on the issue are mixed, though it does appear that adult American citizens who did not graduate from high school are most negatively affected (and this would include white, black American natives, and latinos), then the criticism and penalties should be laid at the doorstep of US businesses that flout the laws and continue to employ undocumented workers, which does depress wages in specific industries while increasing profits. On almost every other measure, immigrants benefit the economy. So long as the US economy keeps growing and businesses keep employing undocumented workers in large numbers without penalty, immigrants seeking jobs will try to get here. The economics seem clear to me, though I could be quite wrong in this.

3) The guest-worker program is a long-term mess waiting to happen. The guest workers will be counted for voting purposes, like Native Americans, African-American enslaved people and women once were, without voting rights and few other civil rights. This is already happening with undocumented workers, and the guest-worker program would write it into law. Again. Employers will continue to employ undocumented workers despite the numerical limits (of 400,000--is this supposed to be a cruel joke?). None of the guest workers will want to go home unless things improve in their home countries or they earn enough to create a viable life back there. Their children, if they have any on US soil, will be American citizens, further tying them to the US. Nothing will be solved. The German and other European models for this sort of program should give everyone pause, though the president [Bush], with his negative capital, was hoping that his lackeys in Congress would pass it, though they had another plan altogether in mind.

4) Since the US government, both the White House and Congress, claims to to take national and border security seriously, it needs to show that this is more than rhetoric and shadowplay. I'm not sure what's going on with the multimillion-dollar boondoggle that we call the Department of Homeland Security, but four years after 9/11, it doesn't appear that there's any real or concerted effort to control the flow of people into the country, unless they are baseball players from Cuba or a European Islamic scholar against whom the current administration has a particular ideological animus. If people can enter the country freely, legally or otherwise, they will, especially if there are available jobs here. For those immigrants who are looking for work, this is a no-brainer.

5) The US needs to revisit the NAFTA agreements and any other pro-free market international trade programs that have devastated particular sectors of treaty members' economies. Mexico's agricultural sector suffered terribly after NAFTA went into effect, and continues to suffer. Neither "free trade" nor the "free market" are "free," despite the neoconservative and neoliberal orthodoxies that the Republican party and much of the Democratic party, especially the DLC wing, subscribe to. Planned, closed economies cannot be the countermeasure, but every US "free-trade," "free market" program needs to be revisited and reworked carefully, particularly if it's only benefitting corporations and shareholders, while millions of working-age people no longer have any realistic employment options. Citizens across Latin America have woken up to the failures of neoliberalism, and Americans need to open our eyes as well.

6) Much of the hysteria involving the immigration issue is focused on Latinos, and in particular, on Mexicans. I'm sure there's no one out there who doesn't already know this, but almost the entire Southwest was under Spanish control, and then was part of Mexico, before it became US territory. Mexicans and people of Mexican heritage have lived in parts of the West and Southwest for centuries. As I pointed out about a month or two ago, Herbert Hoover oversaw the mass deportation of Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans, i.e., US citizens, during the Depression, and only recently was there any apology or acknowledgment of this. This is not to imply that the current Mexican immigration is a kind of karmic payback, but I do want to note that Mexicans in particular have longstanding historical, cultural and social ties to the US. Mexicans, like Canadians and the citizens of other countries that are geographically or historically linked to the US are going to come to the US for job opportunities if they're here, as will people from elsewhere in the world. How many undocumented Canadian citizens are there in the US? I don't see any outcry against Canadians, because most Canadian immigrants to the US are, I would imagine, white.

In fact, there is almost no outcry against undocumented immigrants from Europe (and it's as if the immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean [except for Cuba] and Asia are not acknowledged at all), even though our major cities, and many industries, are full of them. The men working on the lot next to our home in New Jersey are from Eastern Europe. Are they documented? Before I bought my car, half of the cab-drivers I encountered in Chicago were from Romania. Were they documented? Yes, the majority of immigrants to US come from Mexico, but this shouldn't surprise anyone, because the US and Mexico are historically and economically linked and many Mexicans have long had ties to the US. There are numerous immigrants from other countries--in my neighborhood and throughout Chicago, I regularly come across immigrants and refugees from Nigeria, Sudan, Haiti, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Poland, Romania, Russia, and so on. In fact, from 1990 to now [2006], as I reported before, more immigrants from Africa came to this country than all the Africans brought to the US during the period of the slave trade. The immigration issue is not a Mexican or even Latino issue--even if most of the immigrants are from Latin American countries--but a human rights issue.

6) The nativists fail to look at another issue that we should be talking about, which is that if the ideology of neoliberalism and free market globalization are what they are going to keep pushing, they need to rethink issues of nationalism, national sovereignty, citizenship, and the concept of borders altogether. We are quite far from a situation of Kantian perpetual peace pervading a united, one-nation state, yet economic free-trade ideologues seem to believe that goods and services can and should cross borders at will, but fail to acknowledge the real-world national and local issues and crises that arise when real people do so. What do national sovereignty, nationalism, citizenship, constitutionally guaranteed rights, and borders of all sorts mean in an age of globalization, transnationalization, and global and transnational capital?

7) Criminalizing anyone who assists undocument workers is wrong. Building a 700-mile wall is ridiculous. Changing the law to eliminate birth-citizenship is outrageous. Expelling 12-20 million people is absurd and would be impossible anyway even if it weren't.

8) Finally, African Americans individually and as a whole really ought to be thinking carefully about the current immigration situation and its effects on this country. In most of the largest waves of immigration prior to 1965, immigrants of African descent were in the minority, and in places where there was a sizable African-American population, whether Boston, Philadelphia, Savannah, Charleston, New York, etc., African Americans were usually been pushed to the back of the line in favor of the new, mostly European immigrants. Immigrants of African descent usually blended into the African-American population within a generation or two. With the arrival over the last three decades of millions of Africans and people of African descent from Latin America, as well as millions of other Latinos, Asians, Arabs and European people (of all races), I think that we need to revisit and challenge static views of racial prerogatives, race and racial authenticity as they've has traditionally functioned in the US. I also hope the recent waves of immigration provoke a rethinking among African Americans about how we stage racial and ethnic identities in the economic, political and social spheres. Who is black and how do we speak about blackness, and race in general? What is authentic blackness? What is the black real today? How do we and can we represent it? Must one history or set of historical narratives, or racial, national or ethnic (or any other, for that matter) identity or identification trump or cancel out another, or mustn't we begin to think with complexity about who we are? (And this is the case not only for African Americans, but all Americans.) Barack Obama is us. I also hope it will provoke active coalition building to address a number of crucial issues the country faces, and in particular, that African Americans and black people in general face. White supremacy is not going anywhere anytime soon, so thinking of ways to promote countersocialization and counter-processes of identity formation and identification that do not yet again make and reify African Americans as the absolute negative Other, and that foster dynamic cross-racial alliances and means of identification across and within ontological racial boundaries with replicating the current racialized social hierarchies, are some of our current major challenges.