Please understand that I’ve learned from some of the Café commentariat in the past that you approve of the term ‘illegal aliens’, and understand what ‘the Wall’ might mean for Amerikan jobs, better wages, and such. I’m more of a world citizen than a US-centric one, and believe that all of those globally oppressed by capital are my extended family, within reason, of course. Given that, and the history of the world under capitalist conquest, including the current proxy wars via NATO, US drug policy wars, NAFTA and all it meant to the indigenous in Chiapas and Mexico, ‘green capitalism carbon-trading’, genetically modified food and its partners RoundUp-ready poisons, decreasing food sovereignty in the global south, the modern eugenics movement, Native American genocide and slavery, and so on, understand why the concept of ‘illegal alien’ carries no weight with me.
Recently I was advised at another website that I always saw ‘racism in my soup’ (it might have been directed at two others on the comment thread, but considering from whom it came, I doubt it). In my attempt to respond to those charges to the room at large, I’d mentioned both the permitted land grabs in Africa by Euro nations, and in the global south by Maximillian I, friend of Bonparte, and other Imperialist proxies further south. ‘The other’ expendables were always the non-compradors, egalitarian peasants who were tied to the land, but were rousted by their capitalist overlords and the comprador classFrom wsws.org:
“A CNN poll released March 17 shows that 90 percent of Americans believe the government should give immigrants who have lived and worked in the US for a number of years the right to apply for US citizenship, including 84 percent of Trump voters. The total percent opposed to such a proposal has fallen by half since 2014.
This statistic explodes the narrative advanced by Trump, the corporate media, the Democratic Party and the upper-middle class “left” groups orbiting the Democrats, which claims that a racist, backward white working class is fueling Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign. The 90 percent figure is all the more remarkable since it comes in the wake of a decades-long bipartisan campaign to scapegoat immigrants for the social and economic crisis.
The CNN poll also shows that 60 percent of Americans believe the government’s top immigration priority should be ensuring undocumented immigrants have the right to remain in the US. This compares with just 13 percent who say the government should prioritize deportation, and 26 percent who say the US should stop immigrants from entering the US without documents.
These numbers have increased significantly within the last two years. In September 2015, 46 percent of respondents said the government should prioritize defending the rights of immigrants.”
London parses the demographics, then cites:
‘A second poll from the Pew Research Center titled “Americans express increasingly warm feelings toward religious groups” was published in February 2017. According to the poll, Muslims and atheists are the two groups whose popularity is growing most substantially. Compared with three years ago, Americans are more tolerant of members of every religious group except evangelical Christians, whose popularity did not increase.
The Pew report notes that growing acceptance of Muslims in particular is due to a 7 percent increase in the percentage of people who personally know a Muslim person.”
He doesn’t name the polling firms that found:
- 62 percent oppose the building of a wall along the US-Mexico border.
- 77 percent believe undocumented immigrants are “less likely” or “about as likely” to commit crimes than US citizens.
- 68 percent oppose suspending all immigration of Syrian refugees to the US.
Polling on deporting those with ‘criminal records’ gets fuzzy, especially due to fact that ‘a criminal record’ might be a bust for being in the US illegally, which London likely knew, but failed to note.
He closes with:
“That Trump’s attempts to whip-up anti-immigrant hysteria have so far failed to gain broad support does not reduce the danger posed by his program. Trump and his advisors are attempting to build support for a fascist movement aimed at channeling growing social tensions against immigrants in order to prosecute the financial aristocracy’s plans for war abroad and social counterrevolution domestically.
The Democratic Party, which passed the laws used to deport millions, has largely accepted Trump’s xenophobic program and has only opposed him on the basis of a mixture of anti-Russian nationalism and the identity politics of the affluent upper-middle class. In their right-wing campaign, the Democrats are establishing the conditions in which a fascistic movement may take root. Only the working class, organized independently of both parties in a common struggle for social equality, is capable of protecting the rights of immigrants.”
To his framing of Democrats on deportation, HuffPo’s ‘Sanctuary City Movement Highlights Barack Obama’s Complicated Immigration Legacy ‘
“But when Obama took office, his administration pressed local authorities to hand over arrested undocumented immigrants whom ICE identified under a new information-sharing program called “Secure Communities.” Designed by the George W. Bush administration and implemented nationally by Obama, the program required local law enforcement officers to share fingerprints of people they arrested with ICE. Contrary to initial expectations, the Obama administration said cooperation was mandatory.”
Obama scrapped the program in 2014, more on that is below.
“Even the sanctuary city jurisdictions that confronted Obama most forcefully over the last eight years usually framed their logic as a rebellion against federal overreach or the misuse of limited local police resources, rather than as a problem with the president himself. Obama, likewise, struggled to square his image as a champion of reform with his administration’s efforts to expand a program widely reviled within his party that helped him deport record numbers of undocumented immigrants.”
Were his policies that ‘widely reviled’ among Democrats? In any event, the author seems to enjoy the New Enlightenment of Dems having said at the top:
“Of course, Trump’s election has given the sanctuary cities movement added urgency, casting municipalities as underdogs and prodding pro-reform Democrats to adopt positions more consistent with the views of the immigrant rights advocates they’ve long claimed to represent”.
“So many Democratic-led cities have publicly affirmed or expanded their pro-immigrant sanctuary policies over the last two months in response to Trump’s election that it seems the issue is rapidly becoming a consensus position within the party. The movement has spread to universities, which insist that ICE stay off campuses, and has reinforced reformers’ engagement with churches that offer sanctuary to migrants facing deportation.”
But back to the CNN poll. ‘Ann Coulter Exposes How CNN Uses Physical Violence Against Conservatives To Rig Poll Results’, via conervative101com (srsly)
“As long as we live in a country where liberals are going to violently attack anyone who disagrees with them, what is the point of polling? The left’s recent eruptions of rage, lies and fascistic violence has resulted in a populace where no one wants to upset the little darlings. We may as well admit that in the current environment, public policy polls are useless,” said Coulter.
Is Coulter referencing the ‘antifa-punchers’ in NYC and the rioting and physical violence directed at Trump supporters at UC Berkeley where Milo Yiannopoulos had been invited to speak? I reckon so; that sucked. But OTOH, where I start with polling is that they’re almost all push polls to begin with, and er…CNN and Herr Trump have a hella lot of enmity going on between them.
Yeppers; Herr Hair had ‘wondered aloud’ on Twitter if his administration should withhold federal funds to UCB, as he’s personally threatened to do to Sanctuary Cities.
And goddess smack me for showing you his photo on purpose:
Back to the HuffPo report on Sanctuary Cities. Apparently some 447 (more maps at NYT link) jurisdictions met that threshold as of last month, according to a report by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, titled “Searching for Sanctuary. (pdf)” More than 150 others exceeded it.
“This map is based on data collected by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, specifically looking at jurisdictions that limit how much the local police cooperate with requests from federal authorities to hold immigrants in detention.
The center found at least 633 counties with these policies, noting that the Center believes that county policies are more relevant than municipal ones in the debate over immigration enforcement.”
click for larger
From Unicorn Riot:
“In late February, Unicorn Riot dispatched a small media team intent on learning more about the ongoing border crisis to the desert borderlands of Arizona in the southwest United States. While there, we learned how the new Trump regime’s policies were impacting the local community. We saw police pepper spray an immigrant rights protest in the streets of Tucson, and went to the remote areas of the Sonora Desert to witness “water drops” left in hopes of saving lives.
We met organizers with LUPE Tucson, a grassroots immigrant rights organization which has existed since 2015. They told us that many of the migrants trying to cross into the United States consist of indigenous people coming from various areas of South America, and how the United States policies are complacent in what the LUPE organizers call an ongoing refugee crisis caused by US foreign policy.
We also followed humanitarian aid workers from an organization called No More Deaths through the remote Sonora Desert as they left water for migrants in what are called “water drops”. No More Deaths volunteers explained their work providing aid to migrants lost in the borderlands because of the Border Patrol’s policy of “Prevention Through Deterrence”, which forces migrants into the remote desert where many lose their lives because they are unable to afford crossing a safer way.
Here is our mini-documentary on what we learned.” (22 minutes, 1080p)
Consider Tom Mackaman’s ‘Trump’s anti-immigrant orders and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850’, wsws.org
“The infamous Fugitive Slave Act, or the “bloodhound law” as the abolitionists called it, enlisted local police in the North as agents of the slave owners by imposing a $1,000 penalty on any law enforcement official who did not arrest an alleged runaway slave, based on as little as an affidavit of ownership from a Southern court. The law precluded the arrested individual, now bound for deportation to slavery, from having a jury trial or being able to testify on his or her own behalf in court. Its specific intent was to prevent cities and towns in northern states from providing sanctuary to runaway slaves and absorbing them into the growing wage-earning working class.” [snip]
“Like the Fugitive Slave Act, Trump’s executive orders target so-called “sanctuary cities,” where local authorities extend a modicum of social services to undocumented workers and their children, or turn a blind eye to their presence. Like their antebellum precursor, Trump’s orders dragoon local authorities into the apprehension of immigrants, threaten punishment to anyone who would assist immigrants, and deny the apprehended due process.”
Mackaman then includes a longish passage on the parallel of the (largely disregarded by commentators) to both the Fugitive Slave Act and Trump’s anti-immigrant orders: the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, which spawned the FSA due to the issue of expanding ‘slave states’ (or not) during James K. Polk’s administration. Westward Ho Cotton Plantations!
During the Great Depression FDR had targeted Mexicans for deportation who had been divided from Mexico by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; as WWII broke out, the Bracero Program reversed the quaint policy in order to harness a mass wage slave labor force of ‘guest workers’.
“The end of the Bracero Program in 1964, combined with the dispossession of the massive Mexican peasantry owing to the “Green Revolution” organized by US banks and agribusiness in collusion with the Mexican elite, fueled a large-scale labor migration. Driven from the land, their subsistence agriculture replaced by cash-crop agricultural export industries, the Mexican and Central American peasantry has been incorporated, in all but name, into the American working class.
bracero workers registering at at the hidalgo, texas, labor center
Trump’s anti-immigrant measures, like the Fugitive Slave Act, are an attempt to strike out against history and prevent a gathering revolutionary threat. They will prove no more successful.”
From your fonts to the gods’ ears, Mr. Mackaman, and thanks for the great history lesson.
Meanwhile, the fate of Herr T’s second travel ban is an evolving story; judges in at least two states have suspended it. SCOTUS nomine Neil (son of Ann) Gorsuch apparently side-stepped questions on the travel ban in his confirmation hearings.
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clancey sigal (CP) writes in his march 7 ‘ICE unbound’:
“In reality Bannon-Trump can’t afford to retreat from their mass roundup of immigrants because it’s the heart, the very keystone, of their agenda. Block or slow down the deportations is to lose “credibility” with the haters who are their base already raising hell to deport more, more and more.
Unless stopped the racial attack on any of the eleven million “unauthorized” (illegal, undocumented) aliens among us will accelerate. At this moment, all over the country, and here in Los Angeles, the ICEmen are pulling men, women and even children off their jobs, out of schools, from hospitals and courtrooms.
Promotion and bonuses depend on invading “target rich” communities. God help you if you have a DUI or shoplifting offense. Yet, with few exceptions, I scan the press or watch TV news including CNN and MSNBC, and almost nada. Bill Maher, John Oliver, Colbert – nada. For most anchors, hosts and reporters, the mass roundups aren’t happening. The eleven million vanish as if by magic.
We are normalizing the berserk actions of an immigrant political police in order to join the swine hunt for Moscow spies.”
guess in some ‘target-rich locations’, arrests are mostly ’emergencies’; see below.
zounds; a volunteer ICE posse.
in the next dead-tree CP magazine, jeffrey st. clair will up w/ “the ICE-man cometh”.
what bureaucrats! why don’t they put the Citizens Academy Program in & target its programs to the schools themselves? make friends for life who will help kick out their free-loading 8 yr old country destroying illegal bastard classmates leeching off the school voucher program & sucking down our precious lunchroom catsup packets. (no, don’t tell me their parents probably picked those tomatoes. bunch a suckers.)
folks like wsws take great comfort in opinion polls that reflect their faith in the working class. i’m not so sure.
certainly, as Sigal demonstrates, the liberal class is lost.
dunno if citizen posses participate, but there are loads of programs to make sure schools are on the up-and-up on reporting…aliens! the psyop verbiage in the twit links is cringe-worthy propaganda. did you read at the posse link? “hey, we’re all family, and laughed and laughed at the interactive projects!” says a bigwig from citigroup.
love the dickens outta the images of those criminals in the lunch room; catsup packets elevated it to art. yeah, their faith in working class might just be more aspirational than realistic. for now, anyway.
right on cue, though, this is blink-worthy x 20. it actually made my stomach wonky.
andre damon:
“On Wednesday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman addressed an open letter to a group of generals, deep state operatives and a corporate executive in President Trump’s cabinet, effectively calling on them to organize a palace coup.
The recipients of Friedman’s letter, code-named “Calling On a Few Good Men,” are three generals—Secretary of Defense James Mattis, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly—along with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the former oil tycoon and current Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.”
but this is the D party to a T:
“The second major concern is that Trump is stoking popular discontent at home that could spiral out of control and threaten the entire economic and political system. Far from appealing to the broad popular opposition to Trump that began to erupt in the days after his inauguration, the Democratic Party is fixated on avoiding at all costs the emergence of a movement of the working masses. That is why it appeals to the military/intelligence apparatus and the corporate aristocracy in its struggle with the faction of the ruling class represented by Trump.”
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/03/23/pers-m23.html
but i sure loved tom mackaman’s history lesson/s. i do hope others might come and read it, and i do appreciate your doing so. i was about read to put a new post above it. also, could you check your mail? i keep trying to reach people w/ their café emails, and things get returned to sender. fake e -addresses? they tryin’ to tell me somethin’? yikers. ;-)
i’ll spare you the grotesque images that came to mind as I was thinking what a hard-on T. Friedman has for the MIC. (but mean ol’ poopy-headed trump said not nice things about his pwedecessow! whether those accusations are true or not is way above any of our pay grades, incl. certainly Master Disaster Blaster & his porn ‘stache of terror. but only “Mad Dog” Matthis can save us! Sorry to put another wretchedly vile image in anyone’s mind, but don’t forget Tommy got serious wood over Don “he outcrazies everyone” Rumsfeld. he needs to take a hint from the Gadarene swine & toss himself & his legion of demons off a cliff.)
damon has a point. if the working class is so impotent, why is so much energy spent terrorizing us?
lol! thanks for sparing us those images, all right. ;-) but according to what damon says what was in the letter (i didn’t look for it, only x free reads and so on)…it and the CFR r. haass quotes “amerika not first, but…alone” or some such…were about the horrific treason (sorta kidding) of backing off from major confrontation with…roosia. we can’t have that now, can we?
but no, i guess i hadn’t known he was so high on the military per se, so the boot-licking he did was hard to read. betcha he’s bullish on the red queen having ‘come out of the woods’, though (and no, i never clicked into those headlines).
not enough bellicosity, save for: china, north korea, iran, tra la la. working class might be “could be working class:, but how grotesque to see the big union bosses cozying up to his plans, not that the rank and file will see those ‘high paying jobs and bennies’.
lol. having temporary access to a couple of computers, I wasted a NYT view on The ‘Stache’s appeal for the nation’s SS to right the ship of state, (while channeling obvious insults about him gleaned from back when I browsed Wonkette. John Holmes, the Porn ‘Stache, turned pundit.) As disdainful as I am of electoral politics, it does mean something, quite so, to call for the overthrow of an election, no matter how awful the outcome, and that overthrow to be done by not a single “elected” person. via a plainly treasonous coup (not that I believe that “treason” exists as any kind of moral category. it’s a BS word used to batter people’s senses. but it is a word these a-holes toss around more than a baseball at a MLB spring training camp.) electoral politics are, to a degree, it’s a dialectic, the superstructure of the material base, the epiphenomena trailing, responding to, and reflecting the phenomena, of self-cannibalism among ruling interests & factions.
or is it so? Nixon, Clinton, now Trump? is there a pattern here? the smooth transition of power & all that is part of the crap mythos we all, more or less, sucked in heartily, in complete ignorance, at our mothers’ teats. i’m sure the MSNBC crowd would hail Matty Mad Dawg & co’s pencil thru trump’s brain pan as akin to Washington (“Cincinnatus”) overthrowing mad King George.
I don’t know. part of me thinks Trump is the incarnation of the USaian ideal. and many, many people, incl. his own mates & peers, really don’t like what they see. a looking glass one can’t figure out how to go thru w/o smashing.
zounds; polemic of the week..the month. holy crow. but this part will take some extra cogitatin’ diligence on my part, whooosh: “electoral politics are, to a degree, it’s a dialectic, the superstructure of the material base, the epiphenomena trailing, responding to, and reflecting the phenomena, of self-cannibalism among ruling interests & factions”.
yeah, ‘treason’ has been pretty over-used, esp.w/all of the ‘russians helped hack’ floaters. but now you make me want to go read the mustache himself; i’ll resist! don’t now anything about the other ‘stache porn star holmes turned pundit; where does he have a stage?
yeppers, rachel maddow will have read tommy’s treason tips on the air already, eh?
your final paragraph is food for thought, though. in a way, that’s a bit what i see at that Very Smart site over yonder, including the fact that “one of his core promises was to end the political correctness that’s ruled us for ___”;
“he just tells it like it is”. but then, he says a lot of things, doesn’t he? then takes a few back. his comments on how to “eradicate isis” (oops: IS©) *and their families, friends, what.ev.er” are some of the stoopidist things i’ve ever heard, but play well with the ever-more-war crowd.
Excellent update. Thanks again.
There are several areas of resistance that are beginning to become focused.
School districts and principals have been moving to non-compliance with ICE because of the exploitative way ICE used schools to pick up random undocumented people (illegal aliens is you are so legalistically minded) who were picking their kids up at school and then separating parents from kids. That reaction is occurring even in deeply pro-Trump 2016 election counties. It is resistance and compassion at the moment; it could become backlash to the draconian policies. And it puts school districts and sheriffs against each other. Watch how this unfolds.
Networks of individuals are forming to provide sanctuary for undocumented workers that they know personally. That network grows by person-to-person organic expansion.
And on the environment, citizen science is suddenly become a popular interest and works to offset some of the scietific budget cuts.
A lot of the anti-immigrant feeling is being fueled by the technology industry’s use of H1-B Visas and workers to deflate the earnings of US-born technology workers. That and other uses of immigrants in “preferable” jobs means that the anti-immigrant movement in the US likely is more intense with IT workers, constructions workers, and other occupations with higher wages and more middle-class prestige than with those at the very bottom. There even might be some university worker animosity despite the prestige of working at a “global univeristy” and that could shape Democratic skittishness (along with business-oriented Democrats who employ immigrants) in opposing ICE behavior.
The squeaky-clean about the law attitudes (“but they violated the law”) I find often mask economic competition motives when they are not just cultural racism.
What we are about to see is whether the Trump administration (or is it ICE itself) recognizes the authority of judges.
welcome, and yes, we’re watching it unfold. ;-)
i hadn’t seen much on schools refusing cooperation w/ ICE save for chicago, so that’s good to hear. and personal connections and stories are so important, aren’t they? one of these authors touted the “know your rights” meme, “and always carry your green card, if any”, given that a father who’d dropped his kids off at school….might be disappeared right afterward. national lawyers guild has been busy.
another of the authors i’d quoted was also high on the fact that under O’s policies, women and children were kept together, but O, not under herr hair. but lying on concrete floors in giant animal holding pens w/ space blankets together waiting some adjudication (or more often ‘not’) wasn’t much of a picnic, either.
this is likely exactly right: “The squeaky-clean about the law attitudes (“but they violated the law”) I find often mask economic competition motives when they are not just cultural racism.” which is really why i tried to make a bit of a case for the under-lying reasons that many undocumented ever did come to turtle island to begin with.
but as for the hb-1 reasons, yes, and i went to fetch this piece that popular resistance sent this mornin’, on scanning kind of turning that sideways. i think. ;-) ‘Immigration crackdown sparks silicon valley protests’.
http://www.nationofchange.org/2017/03/21/immigration-crackdown-sparks-silicon-valley-protests/
i’m out for the night; sweet dreams. note: dreams aren’t due to bits of undigested potatoes; they’re an alt-universe. ;-)
it’s a complicated story of some kids held in pens, but having secured some quasi-asylum status acronyms, but i chose a few paragraphs illustrating once again: obma’s f-ed deportation machine. yeah, herr t’s will be worse, but i am left wondering how much the number of sanctuary cities grew because: trump.
‘Children as Young as Three Detained 500 Days and Counting in Disgraceful Immigrant Prisons; at “Berks Family Residential Center,” kids contemplate suicide as their mothers go on hunger strike.’
“Roughly 31 moms, one dad, and 33 children are currently being detained in Berks, according to Karen Hoffmann, a legal advocate with ALDEA, the People’s Justice Center. ICE officials said 75 people are locked up at Berks, which is located in the town of Leesport. Most of those incarcerated hail from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala—all countries whose epidemics of violence and poverty have been fueled by U.S. policies.’
Meanwhile, Berks is just one of three family detention centers around the country that are housing parents with their children in prison-like facilities that became a mainstay of former President Barack Obama’s response to mass, violent displacement from Central American countries.
While many are concerned that family incarceration will worsen under Trump, those locked up in immigrant prisons point out that the Obama administration played a key role in their present-day plight.”