"At rally, immigrants focus on deportation’s impact on families" by Gal Tziperman Lotan | Globe Correspondent, May 12, 2013
Elizabeth Perez was 7 months pregnant when she crossed the US-Mexico border, illegally, in 2010.
She fled her Guatemalan hometown because her unborn son’s father had a wife he had neglected to tell her about, and the two threatened her life. At the same time, her village was enveloped in war over land with another community.
Her sister, whom Perez had not seen since she was 8, lived in Chelsea, and she hoped she might have a chance to raise her son in peace in the United States. But she misses her family in Guatemala — her mother died during heart surgery after she left — and fears deportation.
Perez and her son joined other immigrants and advocates in East Boston on Saturday afternoon to rally for new immigration laws and underscore the impact deportations have on families.
I've come to resent the charge of racism and of somehow being anti-family or anti-children when it comes to the law, and I'm also tired of the endless and relentless agenda-pushing by my paper.
Also see: What the Immigration Bill i$ Really About
All that has been obfuscated and minimized in light of the final push.
The event was organized in honor of Mother’s Day by a collection of immigration advocacy groups, including MassUniting, the Student Immigrant Movement, and the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition.
So what is that meant to imply, you are against mothers if you are against cheap foreign labor being insourced to put Americans out of work?
Btw, the whole globalization scheme that has led to mass migrations wasn't my idea. It was the idea and design of the global overlords who benefit from the very system while claiming they are on your side.
Perez said she has turned to various legal and immigrant rights organizations for help. Some will take her name and number and never call her back. One organization has told her she could qualify for legal assistance at a reduced rate, but they will not take her case pro bono.
Without legal immigration status, Perez does not qualify for free public preschool programs for her son, who was born in Massachusetts and will turn 3 this month. She spends most of her income on his day care, she said, and cannot afford legal bills.
“Now, I lost all the hope,” she said. “If they’re going to pass the reform immigration law, I’m going to have a free life.”
So now if you are opposed you are taking away people's freedom and hope?
Conrado Santos, a Student Immigrant Movement member, said the possibility of new immigration laws offers mixed hopes for those in the country illegally.
“I think people are anxious,” Santos said. “Our community is already suffering so much under the weight of deportation. . . . But on the other hand, I think people are excited. For the first time in 26 years, immigration reform is a real possibility.”
Santos is an undocumented immigrant who came to the Unites States from Brazil, following his parents, when he was 13. He graduated from Somerville High School and studied philosophy and public policy at UMass Boston for a year and a half before dropping out because he could not afford it.
Monique Nguyen of Quincy, who was in the country illegally for years after a lawyer let her family’s immigration visas lapse, said she thinks events for undocumented immigrants help unify a group of people who are often too frightened to come together.
That's why our overlords want cheap foreign labor insourced: less complaining.
And I was just wondering when ILLEGAL became NOT THAT BAD a THING.
Related: 4/20: Supreme Court Makes Pot Legal
If your an illegal?
Nguyen, the director of MataHari: Eye of the Day, a human rights organization for immigrant women and women of color, said she hoped Americans considering new immigration laws would think about uniting families separated by deportation.
“When people think about immigration reform, they should think about families,” she said.
Then why is my Congress veering off that requirement in favor of economics (besides, the false flag pinned on the brothers patsy didn't help, either)?
Of course, the implication being if you oppose the legislation you are anti-family.
Nguyen’s parents fled war-torn Vietnam and settled in Vancouver, where she was born.
Have you ever noticed a lot of these people are refugees or immigrants because of AmeriKan wars?
In 1996, her aunt lost her leg when a drunk driver crashed into her while she was loading groceries into her car, and Nguyen’s family moved to Houston, Texas, to help her.
Her parents spent 15 years in the United States, then gave up on the citizenship process after their visas lapsed and they moved back to Canada.
“After being in the US for 15 years, they all dropped their lives to start over in Canada,” she said. “They moved around their whole life, losing their country and then coming here. It’s been really difficult.”
Nguyen studied nutrition and global business at the University of Houston. She married a New Yorker of Filipino descent in 2006 and became a permanent US resident in 2007. Permanent residency means Nguyen can travel freely with her Canadian passport and does not have to fear deportation.
She is eligible to apply for citizenship, but said the $680 application fee is prohibitive.
Oh, did I mention government is going to get a cut of dough on all this? Another reason they are for it.
“I actually decided not to travel to Canada this year so I could use that money to naturalize instead,” she said. Although that meant she would not “see my mom and family for another year,” she said.
And it is all the fault of people like me who believe in fairness and the rule of law.
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"Secure borders? US already has them" by Jeff Jacoby | Globe Columnist, May 12, 2013
Contrary to popular mythology, the federal government has taken border security so seriously that by now it spends more than $18 billion a year on border and immigration enforcement — 15 times what it was spending at the time the 1986 law was enacted.
That is true, and it proves that the whole system has become part of the pri$on-industrial complex.
Washington now puts more money into immigration control than into all other federal criminal law-enforcement agencies — including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, the US Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — combined.
The US Border Patrol has been dramatically built up, with the number of agents at the border having doubled over the past decade alone to more than 21,000. In addition to “boots on the ground,” America’s border is now being patrolled with radar stations, surveillance cameras, nearly 700 miles of steel fencing, and even Predator drones.
With our southern border quasi-militarized in this manner, the number of aliens illegally crossing into the United States has plummeted. From a high of 1.6 million in 2000, Border Patrol apprehensions are now at one-fifth that level, the lowest rate since the 1970s.
Then why the ru$h for the new bill?
For all the complaints about insufficient enforcement, the feds are now more pitiless about prosecuting immigration violators than ever before — today a majority of all federal criminal prosecutions are immigration-related. And illegal immigrants and criminals have been deported with such growing aggressiveness in recent years that during President Obama’s first term, a record 1.5 million deportations were carried out.
And he's supposed to be your friend?
This is not a description of some alternative reality in which border security had been taken more seriously. It’s a description of how seriously immigration and border enforcement have been taken in recent decades. From the Predator drones to the record-high deportations to the vast increase in Border Patrol agents, the last thing Washington can be accused of is ignoring the ferocious public pressure to secure the border.
Though you would never know it from all the hyperventilating and ginned-up outrage, net migration across the southern US border has now fallen to zero — the number of Mexicans entering is now matched (or even exceeded) by the number leaving.
Border security, of course, is a perfectly sensible goal. An impenetrable, airtight Berlin Wall of a border is not.
Why? If it is good enough for Israel....
Mexico and the United States are democratic friends and indispensable economic partners, deeply linked by ties of family, history, and trade. As Shannon O’Neil of the Council on Foreign Relations notes, the US-Mexico border is legally crossed daily by more than $1 billion worth of goods, 13,000 trucks, 1,000 railroad cars, and 400,000 people. It is mad to imagine that such a busy and important frontier could be sealed so hermetically that no one without legal papers can ever get across. It is even madder to insist that intelligent immigration reforms should be held hostage to such an irrational goal.
In other words, he is FOR the immigration bill.
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Related: Picking Up the Pace of Immigration Reform
That's when you want them to slow down.
UPDATES:
"Republican effort to tighten immigrant IDs defeated
WASHINGTON — Senators weighing a landmark immigration bill have defeated an effort by Republicans to require biometric identification to track who is entering and leaving the country.
Yeah, spying is only good for citizens of the country.
The amendment was by Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, who said that without such a system, the legislation would not be able to achieve true border security.
An author of the bill, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, agreed with Sessions that biometric IDs are the most secure.
But he said authors of the bill determined they were too costly to implement anytime soon.
Are you f***ing kidding me?
Instead the bill seeks electronic scanning of photo IDs....
Committee OK’s bill to boost communications on visas
WASHINGTON — Citing problems exposed by the Boston Marathon bombings, senators weighing amendments to the immigration bill agreed Tuesday to boost security provisions around student visas....
There should be no more student visas.
The committee action follows recent disclosures that a student from Kazakhstan accused of hiding evidence for one of the Boston bombing suspects was allowed to return to the United States in January without a valid student visa.
The student visa for Azamat Tazhayakov had been terminated when he arrived in New York on Jan. 20. But the border agent in the airport did not have access to the information in the Department of Homeland Security’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, called SEVIS.
Related: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly About the Boston Marathon Bombings
It's all ugly.
Grassley’s amendment would require the Department of Homeland Security to certify that data from SEVIS is transferred into the databases used by Customs and Border Protection at US ports of entry....
More databases.
‘‘This will plug a loophole in terms of the tragic Boston Marathon bombing,’’ said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, an author of the immigration bill. ‘‘It really strengthens the bill and shows that our bill . . . is going to make things better in terms of terrorism.’’
These guys are f***ing shameless.
******
Two of the Sept. 11 terrorists entered the United States via student visas and Grassley said that demonstrated problems with the program.
And it wasn't fixed then?
His second amendment, also approved by voice vote, would tighten accreditation requirements for schools hosting foreign students and prohibit flight schools not certified by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Aviation Administration from offering student visas.
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