Some time ago there was a thread discussing immigration reform --- and I suggested that Lou Dobbs' position was anti-Christian...
Well, billfmsd did not agree which is his prerogative, but one of the arguments I made was that Jesus's family would not have been allowed to immigrate to Egypt had the laws in existence in the US existed the way they are now...
A Catholic church/social justice center recently grappled with the issue coming to the same conclusion...
Recently, an asylum seeker from Kashmir spoke to a group. As a Christian convert his life had been threatened. Two people close to him, also conerts, had been murdered. He fled to the US to seek asylum and found himself languishuing in a Detention Center. He was one of the more fortunate detainees. After about a year, he received help from First Friends who found him a pro-bono lawyer to work on his case.
Jesus and his family fled political and relgious persecition. These are both present day grounds for asylum aqnd refugee status.
"However, if the Holy Family arrived as a US border today, it is most likely that Jesus would have been sent to a children's detention center, Mary to a women's detention center, and Joseph to a men's detention center. Each would be required to secure their own legal help, or plead their case, on their own, for asylum. Asylum seekers do not receive legal help from the government and although there are a few family shelters in this country, most families are separated on arrival at the border."
From Community for Unity, Manassas, VA, printed on the website at St. Charles Borromeo Church, VA.
Full Version: America's Anti-Christian Immigration Laws
And this is to say nothing of the present detention system which is inhumane, insecure and degrading to all human beings who stay there...
This is one of the reasons why comprehensive immigration reform is necessary...
May 6, 2008
Editorial
Death by Detention
A chilling article by Nina Bernstein in The Times on Monday recounted the secrecy, neglect and lack of oversight that are a few of the shameful symptoms of the booming sector of the nation’s prison industry — the detention of undocumented foreigners.
Ms. Bernstein chronicled the death of Boubacar Bah, a tailor from Guinea who was imprisoned in New Jersey for overstaying a tourist visa. He fell and fractured his skull in the Elizabeth Detention Center early last year. Though clearly gravely injured, Mr. Bah was shackled and taken to a disciplinary cell. He was left alone — unconscious and occasionally foaming at the mouth — for more than 13 hours. He was eventually taken to the hospital and died after four months in a coma.
Nobody told Mr. Bah’s relatives until five days after his fall. When they finally found him, he was on life support, soon to become one of the 66 immigrants known to have died in federal custody between 2004 and 2007. Mr. Bah’s family still does not know the full story of when or how he suffered his fatal injuries.
It is shameful, though hardly a surprise, that they remain in the dark. There is no public system for tracking deaths in immigration custody, no requirement for independent investigations. Relatives and lawyers who want to unearth details of such tragedies have found the bureaucracy unresponsive and hostile. In the case of Mr. Bah, records were marked “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company that runs the Elizabeth Detention Center and many others under contract with the federal government.
Secrecy and shockingly inadequate medical care are hardly the only problems with immigration detention. Immigrants taken into federal custody enter a world where many of the rights taken for granted by people charged with real crimes do not exist. Detainees have no right to legal representation. Many are unable to defend or explain themselves, or even to understand the charges against them, because they don’t speak English and lack access to lawyers or telephones.
What standards do exist for the treatment of immigrants in federal custody are only recommendations. A detainee, family member or lawyer who finds a violation has no way to force the government to correct it.
As authorities at the federal and local level continue rounding up illegal immigrants in these harsh days of ever-stricter enforcement, the potential for abuse will continue to grow — largely out of sight. Although immigration law is every bit as complex as tax law — and the consequences for violators more dire — the detention system seems designed to sacrifice thoughtful deliberation and justice to expediency and swift deportation.
Many detainees may have a valid defense — and at any rate have committed only administrative violations such as overstaying a visa or entering the country without authorization. Yet their cases are handled with a toxic mixture of secrecy and inattention to basic rights. This mistreatment of a vulnerable population, which advocates for immigrants trace to the roundups of Muslims after 9/11 and the subsequent clamor for tougher immigration laws, is hostile to American values and disproportionate to the threat that these immigrants pose.
Congress has failed repeatedly to enact meaningful immigration reform, and the prospects in the next year or so are slim. It can act on this. The government urgently needs to bring the detention system up to basic standards of decency and fairness. That means lifting the veil on detention centers — particularly the private jails and the state prisons and county jails that take detainees under federal contracts — and holding them to the same enforceable standards that apply to prisons. It also means designing a system that is not a vast holding pen for ordinary people who pose no threat to public safety, like the 52-year-old tailor, Boubacar Bah.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/opinion/...agewanted=print
This is one of the reasons why comprehensive immigration reform is necessary...
May 6, 2008
Editorial
Death by Detention
A chilling article by Nina Bernstein in The Times on Monday recounted the secrecy, neglect and lack of oversight that are a few of the shameful symptoms of the booming sector of the nation’s prison industry — the detention of undocumented foreigners.
Ms. Bernstein chronicled the death of Boubacar Bah, a tailor from Guinea who was imprisoned in New Jersey for overstaying a tourist visa. He fell and fractured his skull in the Elizabeth Detention Center early last year. Though clearly gravely injured, Mr. Bah was shackled and taken to a disciplinary cell. He was left alone — unconscious and occasionally foaming at the mouth — for more than 13 hours. He was eventually taken to the hospital and died after four months in a coma.
Nobody told Mr. Bah’s relatives until five days after his fall. When they finally found him, he was on life support, soon to become one of the 66 immigrants known to have died in federal custody between 2004 and 2007. Mr. Bah’s family still does not know the full story of when or how he suffered his fatal injuries.
It is shameful, though hardly a surprise, that they remain in the dark. There is no public system for tracking deaths in immigration custody, no requirement for independent investigations. Relatives and lawyers who want to unearth details of such tragedies have found the bureaucracy unresponsive and hostile. In the case of Mr. Bah, records were marked “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company that runs the Elizabeth Detention Center and many others under contract with the federal government.
Secrecy and shockingly inadequate medical care are hardly the only problems with immigration detention. Immigrants taken into federal custody enter a world where many of the rights taken for granted by people charged with real crimes do not exist. Detainees have no right to legal representation. Many are unable to defend or explain themselves, or even to understand the charges against them, because they don’t speak English and lack access to lawyers or telephones.
What standards do exist for the treatment of immigrants in federal custody are only recommendations. A detainee, family member or lawyer who finds a violation has no way to force the government to correct it.
As authorities at the federal and local level continue rounding up illegal immigrants in these harsh days of ever-stricter enforcement, the potential for abuse will continue to grow — largely out of sight. Although immigration law is every bit as complex as tax law — and the consequences for violators more dire — the detention system seems designed to sacrifice thoughtful deliberation and justice to expediency and swift deportation.
Many detainees may have a valid defense — and at any rate have committed only administrative violations such as overstaying a visa or entering the country without authorization. Yet their cases are handled with a toxic mixture of secrecy and inattention to basic rights. This mistreatment of a vulnerable population, which advocates for immigrants trace to the roundups of Muslims after 9/11 and the subsequent clamor for tougher immigration laws, is hostile to American values and disproportionate to the threat that these immigrants pose.
Congress has failed repeatedly to enact meaningful immigration reform, and the prospects in the next year or so are slim. It can act on this. The government urgently needs to bring the detention system up to basic standards of decency and fairness. That means lifting the veil on detention centers — particularly the private jails and the state prisons and county jails that take detainees under federal contracts — and holding them to the same enforceable standards that apply to prisons. It also means designing a system that is not a vast holding pen for ordinary people who pose no threat to public safety, like the 52-year-old tailor, Boubacar Bah.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/opinion/...agewanted=print
Trenton teen cherishes freedom after seven months in immigration detention
by Helen O'Neill/The Associated Press Saturday July 04, 2009, 7:30 PM
He was born on the Fourth of July, an irony he would only appreciate later, during the dark period of his life when liberty and freedom became far more than mere words in his high school history book.
Daniel Guadron has been fighting the odds all his young life, mostly as a happy warrior, winning admirers and supporters at every turn.
Mel Evans/The Associated PressDaniel Guadron, center, walks with Miriam Mendez, his high school guidance counselor, after his graduation ceremonies from Trenton Central High School in June.It's not just that he excelled in school: The straight-A student mastered English within months of emigrating from Guatemala at 13, then mastered French. He's aced every math test he has ever taken.Or that he is blessed with a sunny nature and ever-flashing smile.
Or that he shines on the soccer field and on the wrestling mat.
The handsome young man has always possessed something more, a wisdom that radiates from his deep brown eyes, a thirst for knowledge and self-improvement, a clarity of vision about the nature of the world and what he can achieve in it.
Everyone could see it -- his teachers at Trenton Central High, his coaches, the running buddies who trained with him for his first 10K race, co-workers in the restaurant where he works on weekends, even a lawyer he befriended in the corporate building he cleans. "Mr. Professor," the lawyer dubbed the teen who cheerfully swept floors even as he dreamed of becoming an engineer.
Daniel's guidance counselor called him "everyone's shining star."
And then, one chilly day in April 2008, the 18-year-old star disappeared.
FROM HIGH SCHOOL STAR TO PRISON UNIFORM
They thundered into the inner-city row house at dawn, shouting and banging doors, their guns as prominent as the letters emblazoned on their windbreakers: ICE.
Daniel was in bed, but he knew who the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had come for -- his mother, Luisa, who had left for work a short time earlier. He refused to tell them where she was, he said in an Associated Press interview later.
And so, agents handcuffed and shackled him and put him in a van. They drove 52 miles to Elizabeth, to a windowless warehouse on a bleak industrial strip near Newark Liberty International Airport. There, Daniel was handed a drab blue prison uniform and locked up with 300 other immigrants.
"Why am I being treated like a criminal," he thought, "when I have done nothing wrong?"
Mel Evans/The Associated PressDaniel Guadron hugs his sister, Sara, after graduation ceremonies from Trenton Central High School in June. It didn't take long for him to learn about the otherworldly universe of U.S. detention centers, where every year about 350,000 asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are held indefinitely while the government decides their fate.Daniel knew that immigrants can be deported if they don't have proper papers. Plenty of illegals live in Trenton and he had heard horror stories about families swept up in ICE raids.
He was aware that his parents, who had separated years earlier, had been working with a lawyer to sort out the family's legal status.
Still, he couldn't understand why he was being punished. After all, he had a Social Security number and legal permission to study and work while the family's case was pending.
His mother sobbed over the phone, promising the lawyer would do everything to free him.
But as the days passed into weeks, Daniel began to despair. He ached for his soccer buddies, his books, his mom. His family couldn't visit because they feared being locked up, too.
Everything about the prison-like setting seemed so dehumanizing, from the thin, wooden board that served as his bed, to the fact that guards called him by his bunk number, not his name.
But what horrified Daniel most was the hopelessness he saw all around -- the haunted, crushed looks of people with nothing to do except fear the future and wonder if they would ever be free.
He yearned for fresh air: The "outdoor recreation" area was nothing more than a large room with a skylight where detainees could exercise for one hour a day. He desperately missed school, especially math. He had been so proud of scoring 96 in honors trigonometry, it made him miserable to think of falling behind.
In H dorm Malcolm Ikolo could see his young bunkmate deteriorating, losing weight, his eyes growing sad and dull. Ikolo, 37, had been in detention for two months, fighting deportation to the Congo.
"Work," he urged Daniel. "Read, exercise, pray. You are young and you are smart. You will survive if you keep your mind busy and your body strong."
And so Daniel began working out with Ikolo, sometimes doing push-ups and calisthenics for hours. He practiced his French, becoming a favorite of other detainees for his willingness to translate documents and letters for them. He practiced yoga. He learned to breakdance, delighting dormmates with his efforts to spin and drop and slide.
Even the staff were drawn to their youngest detainee, who won coveted jobs in the kitchen and the warehouse. Everyone knew it was wrong -- the student missing school, the son paying the price for his parents.
In the evenings Daniel would join the "storytime" sessions in the dorm, when men from Africa and India and China would sip tea and share tales of their countries and their families and their dreams.
My dream is to go to college, he told them. I want to become an engineer -- a great engineer. I want to design bridges so exotic that people will look at them and say, ah, that's a Guadron bridge.
Daniel told them of growing up in Guatemala, and of his initial excitement at landing in America. He described how shocked he had been by the rundown streets of Trenton, how overjoyed by the blessing of school.
"I look strong here," he was fond of saying, flexing his biceps. Then he would tap his forehead. "But up here is where I am really strong."
THE WORD SPREADS
Back in Trenton, word spread quickly: "They've taken Daniel."
In her second-floor classroom, English as a second language teacher Iseult Leger, choked back tears thinking of the teenager who had captivated her from the moment he arrived.
In her chaotic office, bursting with students and files and snacks, guidance counselor Miriam Mendez felt suddenly helpless and lost. In 23 years of teaching and counseling, Mendez had rarely met anyone as deserving of a great education and a happy life. Now what would become her star, the one destined to graduate among the best in his class?
In the office building Daniel cleaned, lawyer Robert Lytle's heart sank when he thought of his "Mr. Professor" behind bars. How could this happen, he thought, to a kid bursting with such personality and promise?
In fact, immigration lawyers say it happens all the time, young people swept up in raids and locked up because their parents brought them into the country illegally. According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, teenagers are routinely deported back to countries and cultures they barely know.
ICE defends the practice, blaming the parents for poor choices.
"The parents made a decision when he was a child," spokeswoman Pat Reilly said. "The Department of Homeland Security did not make that decision."
But even Keith Sklar, the lawyer representing the Guadron family, was outraged. What on earth was the government thinking, warehousing a high school senior?
At the Elizabeth detention center, he learned that Daniel's arrest was apparently the result of some paperwork confusion; ICE said the family had missed a scheduled court appearance and were therefore considered deportable and a flight risk.
Sklar had been trying to win the family legal status under the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, which provides relief for families from certain Central American countries if a family member had been living here for years, as Daniel's father had. (A final decision in the case is scheduled for October 2009).
Be patient, Sklar urged Daniel when he visited Elizabeth.
But some days were so dark that Daniel broke down and cried.
There was July 4, his 19th birthday, when bunkmates sang "Happy Birthday." And the day his grandmother came to see him, the only family member who dared because she was legally visiting from Guatemala. Seeing her grandson behind a dirty glass partition, unable to hug him, permitted only to talk by phone, she wept.
But the blackest day was Sept. 7, the first day of school. Daniel couldn't sleep, couldn't eat. He lay on his bunk tormented by images of his classmates filing into classrooms. How would he ever catch up? Would he even graduate?
REMEMBER US, DANIEL
"Pack your things," the guard said. "You are getting out."
As other detainees realized what was happening -- that Daniel was being paroled -- the dorms erupted in cheers. "Good luck, Daniel!" they shouted. "Remember us, Daniel!"
At 7:30 p.m., Oct. 30, 2008, after nearly seven months in detention, Daniel stepped into the parking lot. His sister Sara was waiting. She had spent the day signing paperwork and collecting donations from relatives to pay for his $3,000 bail. Sklar had managed to reopen the family's case and secure Daniel's release.
When he strode into Trenton Central High the next morning it seemed like the corridors were ringing with his name. Classmates shrieked and clapped, teachers wrapped him in hugs. "It was like I was a rock star," he says, laughing.
But his joy was quickly tempered by a grim reality: Because Daniel had missed nearly two quarters, his usual straight-A's had been replaced by zeros. His place in graduation would be affected, along with his prospects for college.
Worse, the one college he had set his heart on -- the New Jersey Institute of Technology -- couldn't even process his financial aid application because he was not a permanent resident. At Mercer County Community College he was told that he would have to pay full tuition, $3,824 a semester, unless he had a green card.
Daniel's heart sank. How could he possibly raise nearly $4,000?
What about my dreams of becoming an engineer, he asked Sara, despondently.
"Daniel," she said, "People find ways to pay for their dreams."
THE COMEBACK
Detention changed Daniel; everyone could see it. Sara jokes that it made him "nicer," more considerate. Others marveled at how his spirit had not been extinguished and how his determination was as strong as ever.
At school Daniel quickly caught up, earning A's in every subject. He began training for his first marathon. He started a breakdancing group with friends. With the help of Mendez, he secured three small scholarships, covering about half his tuition costs for Mercer. He hopes that by next year he will have a green card and can transfer to NJIT.
On June 24, Daniel Humbarto Guadron donned a black cap and, to the thundering applause of several thousand onlookers in a downtown stadium, he was awarded his high school diploma. He had graduated 63rd in a class of 456. It was the happiest moment of his life.
Outside, Daniel's mother and grandmother and sister engulfed him in hugs. Teachers congratulated him. Daniel beamed, thanking everyone, promising them that he would not disappoint them and that one day, "the world is going to know the name Daniel Guadron."
<A href="http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/after_nearly_7_months_as_a_det.html">http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/after_nearly_7_months_as_a_det.html
This is the result of a broken immigration system...
A humanitarian constitutional democratic republic wouldn't allow this to happen.
Well, maybe this idea is growing on me then... 
Intelligence Report
Winter 2006
'Christian' Nativism
'Before immigration came along, we were building an alliance. We had agreement on traditional marriage, partial birth abortion -- so many threads were being woven together. Immigration threatens to become the definitive divide.'
Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (Getty Images)
Meeting of the Minds
The Secure Borders Coalition is where the religious right meets and meshes with the extreme end of anti-immigrant politics. An alliance of Christian Right groups, hard-right organizations like Accuracy in Media and the Swift Boat Veterans, and strident but secular anti-immigration outfits such as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, the coalition in June issued a strong statement opposing all amnesty and guest worker proposals. It vowed to oppose any candidate, regardless of his or her stance on other issues, who does not toe the line on immigration. Remarkably, it also calls for a near-freeze in legal immigration.
"We favor a policy of attrition of the illegal population through strong enforcement of our nation's immigration laws, which includes, first and foremost, the securing of our borders," reads the coalition statement. "[W]e dedicate ourselves to defeating any 2008 presidential candidate who [disagrees]… . We pledge to do so regardless of political party and in both the primaries and the general election."
The list of religious-right figures signing the coalition statement is long and varied. It includes Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, Lou Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition, Howard Phillips' Conservative Caucus and Bishop Harry R. Jackson of Hope Christian Ministries. The signatories concerned primarily with immigration include English First, the American Council for Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, Pro-English, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.
One possible future for this nexus can be glimpsed in the budding relationship between two Secure Border Coalition members -- a relationship that links religious-right political muscle to the literal muscle of the vigilante border-patrol movement. Last spring, Chris Simcox put his Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC) under the wing of Alan Keyes' Declaration Alliance, a group dedicated to overturning Roe v. Wade that also believes in a "founding mandate to freely and publicly acknowledge the authority of the Creator God." Along with imbuing the Simcox group with a touch of the divine, the MCDC/Keyes arrangement saw Simcox's mailing lists handed over to Response Unlimited, a Keyes-connected Christian mailing and telemarketing firm that now sells lists of MCDC donors for $120 per thousand names.
Another, similar relationship is developing between the Eagle Forum (founded in 1972 and one of the oldest religious right groups) and the Minuteman Project of Jim Gilchrist, Simcox's former organizational partner (Gilchrist did not join the Secure Borders Coalition). The Eagle Forum's Schlafly, a long-time gay-basher, believes that guest-worker programs and amnesty are "immoral." The Christian thing to do, argued Schlafly in her newsletter last January, is to "erect a fence and double our border agents in order to stop the drugs, the smuggling racket, the diseases, and the crimes." Gilchrist, who holds a similar view, was a featured guest at the 35th annual Eagle Forum Conference in September.
Other religious right groups may not be officially aligned with the border-vigilante movement, but hold views indicating sympathy or approval.
"As the United States Senate continues debate on an immigration reform bill, the American people are backed up by the Bible in their demands that America's national boundaries are to be respected," writes Roberta Combs, national president of the Christian Coalition. "The left wing in this nation is thoroughly wrong when they argue that 'because Christ showed compassion to all of God's children, Christians should ignore violations of the law by aliens.'"
'Culture,' Christianity and Race
The kind of first-principle absolutism found in the Secure Borders Coalition statement, once reserved for the so-called culture war, indicates that immigration has touched a central nerve on the religious right. But it is not simply a national-security or law-and-order nerve, as no other national security issue generates so much heat within the movement.
So what's going on? In the words of FRC's Tony Perkins, what's at stake is not so much guarding America's security as protecting its "cultural fabric."
Gary Bauer, president of American Values and an icon of the religious right, has said as much. In June, Bauer wrote an op-ed for USA Today that decried the failure of Latino immigrants to integrate into American society. "Hyphenated Americans put other countries and affiliations first, and they drive a wedge into the heart of 'one nation'," he wrote.
In choosing to highlight the "cultural" dimension of Latino immigration, Bauer echoed the nativist argument offered by Patrick Buchanan in his bestselling anti-immigrant screed, State of Emergency . Bauer also lifted a lid on the motivations of many anti-immigration voices on the Christian Right -- motivations more commonly cloaked in the rhetoric of law and order. Bauer admits as much, calling culture the "unmentioned undercurrent" in the immigration debate.
Some, farther out on the intellectual fringes of the movement, are more blunt. Thomas Fleming, president of the Christian-flavored Rockford Institute and, like Buchanan, a Catholic, says "culture" sits at the heart of his anti-immigration position. At a September institute-sponsored conference in Washington where Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) delivered the keynote address, Fleming said that "the cultural ambience aspect of [the immigration debate] is the only one that interests me." Writing in the Rockford Institute magazine Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, Fleming was plainer about what he means when he says "culture," admitting, "Whatever we may say in public, most of us do not much like Mexicans, whom we regard as too irrational, too violent, too passionate."
"Some American Catholics think we should welcome the hordes of pro-life Catholics swarming across our southern border," continued Fleming. "But this is a mistake. Mexicans quickly become acclimated to America's culture of consumerism and infanticide. What they do not appear to relinquish is their own traditional style of violence."
Nor has the contentious question of culture completely escaped the notice of James Dobson's much larger and more mainstream Focus on the Family, which maintains a Spanish-language website and has been cautious on the issue. Last summer, the group's website chose to run a shining review of Victor Davis Hanson's Mexifornia, a lament for the defunct white-majority California of Hanson's youth.
"Jobs do indeed have a lot to do with the issue [of immigration]," the Focus reviewer wrote. "But not as much as culture -- and that's what should really concern Americans most."
The issue of immigration, it seems, not only threatens the success of the religious right's larger culture war by alienating conservative Latinos. Immigration is also a growing component of that culture war.
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport...e.jsp?pid=1314#
Winter 2006
'Christian' Nativism
'Before immigration came along, we were building an alliance. We had agreement on traditional marriage, partial birth abortion -- so many threads were being woven together. Immigration threatens to become the definitive divide.'
Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (Getty Images)
Meeting of the Minds
The Secure Borders Coalition is where the religious right meets and meshes with the extreme end of anti-immigrant politics. An alliance of Christian Right groups, hard-right organizations like Accuracy in Media and the Swift Boat Veterans, and strident but secular anti-immigration outfits such as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, the coalition in June issued a strong statement opposing all amnesty and guest worker proposals. It vowed to oppose any candidate, regardless of his or her stance on other issues, who does not toe the line on immigration. Remarkably, it also calls for a near-freeze in legal immigration.
"We favor a policy of attrition of the illegal population through strong enforcement of our nation's immigration laws, which includes, first and foremost, the securing of our borders," reads the coalition statement. "[W]e dedicate ourselves to defeating any 2008 presidential candidate who [disagrees]… . We pledge to do so regardless of political party and in both the primaries and the general election."
The list of religious-right figures signing the coalition statement is long and varied. It includes Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, Lou Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition, Howard Phillips' Conservative Caucus and Bishop Harry R. Jackson of Hope Christian Ministries. The signatories concerned primarily with immigration include English First, the American Council for Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, Pro-English, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.
One possible future for this nexus can be glimpsed in the budding relationship between two Secure Border Coalition members -- a relationship that links religious-right political muscle to the literal muscle of the vigilante border-patrol movement. Last spring, Chris Simcox put his Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC) under the wing of Alan Keyes' Declaration Alliance, a group dedicated to overturning Roe v. Wade that also believes in a "founding mandate to freely and publicly acknowledge the authority of the Creator God." Along with imbuing the Simcox group with a touch of the divine, the MCDC/Keyes arrangement saw Simcox's mailing lists handed over to Response Unlimited, a Keyes-connected Christian mailing and telemarketing firm that now sells lists of MCDC donors for $120 per thousand names.
Another, similar relationship is developing between the Eagle Forum (founded in 1972 and one of the oldest religious right groups) and the Minuteman Project of Jim Gilchrist, Simcox's former organizational partner (Gilchrist did not join the Secure Borders Coalition). The Eagle Forum's Schlafly, a long-time gay-basher, believes that guest-worker programs and amnesty are "immoral." The Christian thing to do, argued Schlafly in her newsletter last January, is to "erect a fence and double our border agents in order to stop the drugs, the smuggling racket, the diseases, and the crimes." Gilchrist, who holds a similar view, was a featured guest at the 35th annual Eagle Forum Conference in September.
Other religious right groups may not be officially aligned with the border-vigilante movement, but hold views indicating sympathy or approval.
"As the United States Senate continues debate on an immigration reform bill, the American people are backed up by the Bible in their demands that America's national boundaries are to be respected," writes Roberta Combs, national president of the Christian Coalition. "The left wing in this nation is thoroughly wrong when they argue that 'because Christ showed compassion to all of God's children, Christians should ignore violations of the law by aliens.'"
'Culture,' Christianity and Race
The kind of first-principle absolutism found in the Secure Borders Coalition statement, once reserved for the so-called culture war, indicates that immigration has touched a central nerve on the religious right. But it is not simply a national-security or law-and-order nerve, as no other national security issue generates so much heat within the movement.
So what's going on? In the words of FRC's Tony Perkins, what's at stake is not so much guarding America's security as protecting its "cultural fabric."
Gary Bauer, president of American Values and an icon of the religious right, has said as much. In June, Bauer wrote an op-ed for USA Today that decried the failure of Latino immigrants to integrate into American society. "Hyphenated Americans put other countries and affiliations first, and they drive a wedge into the heart of 'one nation'," he wrote.
In choosing to highlight the "cultural" dimension of Latino immigration, Bauer echoed the nativist argument offered by Patrick Buchanan in his bestselling anti-immigrant screed, State of Emergency . Bauer also lifted a lid on the motivations of many anti-immigration voices on the Christian Right -- motivations more commonly cloaked in the rhetoric of law and order. Bauer admits as much, calling culture the "unmentioned undercurrent" in the immigration debate.
Some, farther out on the intellectual fringes of the movement, are more blunt. Thomas Fleming, president of the Christian-flavored Rockford Institute and, like Buchanan, a Catholic, says "culture" sits at the heart of his anti-immigration position. At a September institute-sponsored conference in Washington where Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) delivered the keynote address, Fleming said that "the cultural ambience aspect of [the immigration debate] is the only one that interests me." Writing in the Rockford Institute magazine Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, Fleming was plainer about what he means when he says "culture," admitting, "Whatever we may say in public, most of us do not much like Mexicans, whom we regard as too irrational, too violent, too passionate."
"Some American Catholics think we should welcome the hordes of pro-life Catholics swarming across our southern border," continued Fleming. "But this is a mistake. Mexicans quickly become acclimated to America's culture of consumerism and infanticide. What they do not appear to relinquish is their own traditional style of violence."
Nor has the contentious question of culture completely escaped the notice of James Dobson's much larger and more mainstream Focus on the Family, which maintains a Spanish-language website and has been cautious on the issue. Last summer, the group's website chose to run a shining review of Victor Davis Hanson's Mexifornia, a lament for the defunct white-majority California of Hanson's youth.
"Jobs do indeed have a lot to do with the issue [of immigration]," the Focus reviewer wrote. "But not as much as culture -- and that's what should really concern Americans most."
The issue of immigration, it seems, not only threatens the success of the religious right's larger culture war by alienating conservative Latinos. Immigration is also a growing component of that culture war.
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport...e.jsp?pid=1314#
Is discrimination anti-Christian?
Report Finds Widespread Discrimination Against Latino Immigrants in South
By Daphne Eviatar 4/21/09 12:08 PM
http://washingtonindependent.com/39823/rep...grants-in-south
A new report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that low-income Latino immigrants face increasing hostility as they fill low-wage jobs in the southern United States, which until recently had few Latino immigrants until recently. Based on a survey of 500 low-income Latinos across the South — including legal residents, undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens — the report concludes that Latinos are frequent victims of theft, workplace discrimination, sexual abuse and violence.
“The assumption is that every Latino possibly is undocumented,” Angeles Ortega-Moore, an immigrant advocate in North Carolina, told the law center’s researchers. So discrimination “has spread over into the legal population.”
The report describes horrific abuses of Latino immigrants, including a young mother arrested and jailed when she asked to be paid for her work in a Tennessee cheese factory; a migrant bean picker whose life savings were confiscated by police during a traffic stop, and a rapist in Georgia going unpunished because his 13-year-old victim is undocumented.
“We’re talking about a matter of basic human rights here,” said SPLC President Richard Cohen in a statement released with the report. “By allowing this cycle of abuse and discrimination to continue, we’re creating an underclass of people who are invisible to justice and undermining our country’s fundamental ideals.”
According to the report, this “civil rights crisis” can best be addressed by comprehensive immigration reform that offers a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Two weeks ago, an Obama administration official said that President Obama plans to introduce just such a plan later this year. Although Latino and immigrant advocacy groups have been pushing for a path to legalization for years and had won some support from President George W. Bush, restrictionist groups and many Republicans argue that legalization will heighten competition for legal U.S. workers already facing high levels of unemployment.
However, supporters of immigration reform, including many economists, argue that legalization in the long run can raise government revenue and boost consumer demand and investment.
By Daphne Eviatar 4/21/09 12:08 PM
http://washingtonindependent.com/39823/rep...grants-in-south
A new report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that low-income Latino immigrants face increasing hostility as they fill low-wage jobs in the southern United States, which until recently had few Latino immigrants until recently. Based on a survey of 500 low-income Latinos across the South — including legal residents, undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens — the report concludes that Latinos are frequent victims of theft, workplace discrimination, sexual abuse and violence.
“The assumption is that every Latino possibly is undocumented,” Angeles Ortega-Moore, an immigrant advocate in North Carolina, told the law center’s researchers. So discrimination “has spread over into the legal population.”
The report describes horrific abuses of Latino immigrants, including a young mother arrested and jailed when she asked to be paid for her work in a Tennessee cheese factory; a migrant bean picker whose life savings were confiscated by police during a traffic stop, and a rapist in Georgia going unpunished because his 13-year-old victim is undocumented.
“We’re talking about a matter of basic human rights here,” said SPLC President Richard Cohen in a statement released with the report. “By allowing this cycle of abuse and discrimination to continue, we’re creating an underclass of people who are invisible to justice and undermining our country’s fundamental ideals.”
According to the report, this “civil rights crisis” can best be addressed by comprehensive immigration reform that offers a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Two weeks ago, an Obama administration official said that President Obama plans to introduce just such a plan later this year. Although Latino and immigrant advocacy groups have been pushing for a path to legalization for years and had won some support from President George W. Bush, restrictionist groups and many Republicans argue that legalization will heighten competition for legal U.S. workers already facing high levels of unemployment.
However, supporters of immigration reform, including many economists, argue that legalization in the long run can raise government revenue and boost consumer demand and investment.
It is silly to believe that we can close our borders to persons based on their education and not think such an act would be anti-Christian.
What do you think?
By engaging in Bush tactics here Obama may be pressing his own anti-Christian approach...
June 5, 2009
Editorial
Hope and Worry on Immigration
This week, in Washington and cities across the nation, immigrant advocates, clergy members and labor and business leaders have been meeting to press their case for comprehensive immigration reform. Hopes have been raised before and repeatedly dashed. But this year there is a chance — if the White House provides real leadership and Congressional leaders show the courage and sense they have previously lacked.
President Obama has pledged his support for reform that includes a path to citizenship for the undocumented. At the same time, his administration has not done nearly enough to moderate enforcement policies that unfairly target citizens and legal residents — often because they are Hispanic — while feeding the fear and hopelessness of illegal immigrants as they await the opportunity to get right with the law.
The Department of Homeland Security has been pressing ahead with the old Bush administration playbook of tightening the screws on the 12 million undocumented, particularly by lengthening the long arm of local law enforcement. Make no mistake: Stronger and more effective immigration enforcement should be a pillar of any reform plan. But stricter enforcement must be coupled with a path to legalization. And poorly designed enforcement without stringent checks on errors and abuse is a remedy worse than the disease.
The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, is sticking with the 287(g) program, which deputizes local police departments to enforce immigration law, despite all-too-frequent errors and abuses. Despite community outrage over racial profiling and indiscriminate “crime sweeps” in Maricopa County, Ariz., by the notorious sheriff, Joe Arpaio, he remains a member in good standing of Ms. Napolitano’s enforcement team.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is expanding its Secure Communities program, which automatically checks the immigration status of everyone booked in jail. That sounds benign, but advocates have raised legitimate concerns over its lack of oversight and internal controls. Any blanket checks of arrestees, both innocent and guilty, could easily provide cover to police departments that use neighborhood sweeps and mass arrests as a pretext to “cleanse” communities of unwanted immigrants — not just violent criminals, but harmless housekeepers, day laborers and gardeners.
There could be no quicker way than this to erode the hard-won advances in community policing, through which law enforcement agencies rely on the trust and cooperation of the people they protect.
There is a grim contradiction at work here, with the Obama administration simultaneously, and self-destructively, twisting the dials of hope and fear.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/opinion/...agewanted=print
June 5, 2009
Editorial
Hope and Worry on Immigration
This week, in Washington and cities across the nation, immigrant advocates, clergy members and labor and business leaders have been meeting to press their case for comprehensive immigration reform. Hopes have been raised before and repeatedly dashed. But this year there is a chance — if the White House provides real leadership and Congressional leaders show the courage and sense they have previously lacked.
President Obama has pledged his support for reform that includes a path to citizenship for the undocumented. At the same time, his administration has not done nearly enough to moderate enforcement policies that unfairly target citizens and legal residents — often because they are Hispanic — while feeding the fear and hopelessness of illegal immigrants as they await the opportunity to get right with the law.
The Department of Homeland Security has been pressing ahead with the old Bush administration playbook of tightening the screws on the 12 million undocumented, particularly by lengthening the long arm of local law enforcement. Make no mistake: Stronger and more effective immigration enforcement should be a pillar of any reform plan. But stricter enforcement must be coupled with a path to legalization. And poorly designed enforcement without stringent checks on errors and abuse is a remedy worse than the disease.
The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, is sticking with the 287(g) program, which deputizes local police departments to enforce immigration law, despite all-too-frequent errors and abuses. Despite community outrage over racial profiling and indiscriminate “crime sweeps” in Maricopa County, Ariz., by the notorious sheriff, Joe Arpaio, he remains a member in good standing of Ms. Napolitano’s enforcement team.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is expanding its Secure Communities program, which automatically checks the immigration status of everyone booked in jail. That sounds benign, but advocates have raised legitimate concerns over its lack of oversight and internal controls. Any blanket checks of arrestees, both innocent and guilty, could easily provide cover to police departments that use neighborhood sweeps and mass arrests as a pretext to “cleanse” communities of unwanted immigrants — not just violent criminals, but harmless housekeepers, day laborers and gardeners.
There could be no quicker way than this to erode the hard-won advances in community policing, through which law enforcement agencies rely on the trust and cooperation of the people they protect.
There is a grim contradiction at work here, with the Obama administration simultaneously, and self-destructively, twisting the dials of hope and fear.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/opinion/...agewanted=print
USA follows old Australian road on immigration detention
March 25, 2009 – 11:14 pm, by Andrew Bartlett
As Australia moves away from some of our past discredited, damaging, expensive and inhumane policies in the area of immigration detention, it seems the USA and Italy have moved in the opposite direction.
While there is room for further improvement, there is no doubt Australia has made major advances in recent years in the laws and practices surrounding immigration detention. Current approaches are more transparent, fairer, more effective, less harmful and much less expensive, and this looks likely to soon move further in the right direction.
Unfortunately, while Australia is finally trending in a positive direction, it appears that other parts of the western world are descending very rapidly towards the sorts of human rights abuses Australia is finally abandoning.
A report released by Amnesty International USA sounds tragically familiar to the recent past in Australia.
From News Daily:
According to Amnesty, tens of thousands of people languish in American immigration detention facilities every year — including a number of U.S. citizens — without receiving a hearing to determine whether their detention is warranted.
From Bloomberg:
Since 1996, the number of people detained has multiplied three times to more than 30,000 from 10,000, according to the report, released today. In some cases, U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents have been incarcerated for years before getting the opportunity to prove their status, the report said.
And from The Washington Independent:
Conducted by Amnesty researchers based on interviews over the course of a year with immigration lawyers and judges, asylum seekers, government officials and non-governmental organizations, the report finds that U.S. immigration policy has increasingly detained immigrants – including lawful residents and even some U.S. citizens – without a meaningful ability to challenge their detentions in an objective judicial proceeding, without access to a lawyer to help them determine their legal status, and often in inhumane conditions, commingled with criminals and denied access to minimal health care.
The recent treatment of asylum seekers by the Italian government on the island of Lampedusa also sounds very much like several leaves have been taken out of the discredited, dehumanising book which until recently was followed as a matter of policy by the Australian government – including efforts to “extra-territorialise” the problem by offloading asylum seekers to third countries where there is no obligation to properly assess refugee claims, or detaining them in inappropriate facilities with little access to legal assistance.
Whilst some political rhetoric and posturing on this topic is still happening from time to time in Australia, the fact that all the members of the federal Parliament’s Immigration Committee, from both major parties, signed off on a report which recommends more changes beyond what the federal government has done to date is a major signal of just far things have progressed in this area. The only dissension in that report was from 2 Liberal and (less surprisingly) one Green MP who felt the further reforms recommended in the report didn’t go far enough!
The significant shifts in policy, legislation and (mostly) in public debate in Australia in a relatively short time frame are a reminder that poor practices can be turned around. Things might need a change of government before they will improve in Italy, but there are growing calls for the Obama administration to reverse the systematic human breaches that built up during the Bush era and introduce comprehensive reform in the content and administration of immigration laws. Immigration and the rule of law are two key factors in what built the USA into such a major economic, political and cultural force. Obama would be wise to move quickly to reverse the damage that has been done in those two areas.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/bartlett/2009/03/25/411/
March 25, 2009 – 11:14 pm, by Andrew Bartlett
As Australia moves away from some of our past discredited, damaging, expensive and inhumane policies in the area of immigration detention, it seems the USA and Italy have moved in the opposite direction.
While there is room for further improvement, there is no doubt Australia has made major advances in recent years in the laws and practices surrounding immigration detention. Current approaches are more transparent, fairer, more effective, less harmful and much less expensive, and this looks likely to soon move further in the right direction.
Unfortunately, while Australia is finally trending in a positive direction, it appears that other parts of the western world are descending very rapidly towards the sorts of human rights abuses Australia is finally abandoning.
A report released by Amnesty International USA sounds tragically familiar to the recent past in Australia.
From News Daily:
According to Amnesty, tens of thousands of people languish in American immigration detention facilities every year — including a number of U.S. citizens — without receiving a hearing to determine whether their detention is warranted.
From Bloomberg:
Since 1996, the number of people detained has multiplied three times to more than 30,000 from 10,000, according to the report, released today. In some cases, U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents have been incarcerated for years before getting the opportunity to prove their status, the report said.
And from The Washington Independent:
Conducted by Amnesty researchers based on interviews over the course of a year with immigration lawyers and judges, asylum seekers, government officials and non-governmental organizations, the report finds that U.S. immigration policy has increasingly detained immigrants – including lawful residents and even some U.S. citizens – without a meaningful ability to challenge their detentions in an objective judicial proceeding, without access to a lawyer to help them determine their legal status, and often in inhumane conditions, commingled with criminals and denied access to minimal health care.
The recent treatment of asylum seekers by the Italian government on the island of Lampedusa also sounds very much like several leaves have been taken out of the discredited, dehumanising book which until recently was followed as a matter of policy by the Australian government – including efforts to “extra-territorialise” the problem by offloading asylum seekers to third countries where there is no obligation to properly assess refugee claims, or detaining them in inappropriate facilities with little access to legal assistance.
Whilst some political rhetoric and posturing on this topic is still happening from time to time in Australia, the fact that all the members of the federal Parliament’s Immigration Committee, from both major parties, signed off on a report which recommends more changes beyond what the federal government has done to date is a major signal of just far things have progressed in this area. The only dissension in that report was from 2 Liberal and (less surprisingly) one Green MP who felt the further reforms recommended in the report didn’t go far enough!
The significant shifts in policy, legislation and (mostly) in public debate in Australia in a relatively short time frame are a reminder that poor practices can be turned around. Things might need a change of government before they will improve in Italy, but there are growing calls for the Obama administration to reverse the systematic human breaches that built up during the Bush era and introduce comprehensive reform in the content and administration of immigration laws. Immigration and the rule of law are two key factors in what built the USA into such a major economic, political and cultural force. Obama would be wise to move quickly to reverse the damage that has been done in those two areas.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/bartlett/2009/03/25/411/
Monday March 16, 2009 15:24 EDT
America's inhumane immigration inequality
(updated below - Update II)
The Washington Post Editorial Page today urges support for a pending bill that would grant gay American citizens the right to have a permanent visa issued to their foreign national spouses (a right which, thanks to the Defense of Marriage Act, only heterosexual Americans currently enjoy):
The Uniting American Families Act would allow gay and lesbian Americans and permanent residents to sponsor their foreign-born partners for legal residency in the United States. The bill, introduced last month in the Senate by Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and in the House by Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), would add "permanent partner" and "permanent partnership" after the words "spouse" and "marriage" in relevant sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act. If passed, it would right a gross unfairness. . . .
The strain of the status quo on gay and lesbian binational couples should not be discounted. Because their relationships are not legally recognized by the United States, some couples have resorted to illegal marriages where the foreign nationals marry Americans to get green cards that allow them to stay in the country permanently. In other cases, Americans have exiled themselves to be with their partners. Sixteen countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the United Kingdom, allow residents to sponsor same-sex permanent partners for legal immigration. American gays and lesbians should not have to choose between their country and their partners.
This is an issue that directly and personally affects me: my partner is Brazilian and unable to get a visa to live in the U.S., which means our only option for living together is to live in Brazil, as that country (like many civilized Western countries, but unlike the U.S.) issues permanent visas to the same-sex partners of their citizens. For that reason, I tend not write about this issue, because that sort of direct investment can preclude dispassionate analysis. But just consider how grave is the injustice imposed by the current state of American law in this regard.
American citizens who marry a foreign national of the opposite sex are entitled to receive, more or less automatically, a Green Card for their spouse so they can live together in the United States. By rather stark contrast, gay American citizens who enter into a spousal relationship with a foreign national have (at most) two legal choices, both horrible:
(1) Live in the U.S., but remain permanently separated -- by oceans and continents -- from the person with whom they want to share their life; or
(2) Live together with one’s spouse in the spouse’s country, but be prevented from living in one’s own country.
As horrible as those two choices are, those who at least have that choice are, relatively speaking, quite lucky. Many gay Americans in a relationship with a foreign national don’t even have option (2) available, either because their spouse’s country also doesn’t extend immigration rights to same-sex couples and/or because they’re unable to earn a living while residing outside of the U.S.
As a result, there are countless Americans (Human Rights Watch puts the number in the "thousands") who, by virtue of this punitive law, are literally prevented from living on the same continent as their partner. The inequality embedded in the law (and codified by DOMA) shatters families and puts people into truly horrendous predicaments. Independent of one’s views of gay marriage, who could possibly justify that? Here's just one account of many, from The Boston Globe, describing how this legal injustice wrecks people's lives for no reason.
Consider the list of countries which do grant permanent visas to the same-sex partners of their citizens (it's actually 19 nations that do so). Most of those countries do not recognize gay marriage. Many are actually quite socially conservative. Notwithstanding their social conservativism, those countries do not want to put their gay citizens in the horrific position of having to choose between their country or their partners, or worse still, be barred from living with their partner at all.
The example of Brazil is quite instructive. Until 1985, that country lived under a military dictatorship. It has the largest Catholic population of any country on the planet. It is more socially conservative even than the U.S., as evidenced by its virtually absolute, nationwide ban on abortion. The Catholic Church plays a far more influential role in Brazil's political life than in America's. As demonstrated by the recent controversy arising from a Brazilian Archbishop's vocal condemnation of the abortion of a 9-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather and faced a high risk of death if the pregnancy developed to full term (the Archbishop even excommunicated the girl, her mother, and the doctors who performed the abortion), the Catholic Church in Brazil is much more assertive and stringent in its involvement in social affairs than is true for the U.S. And there is also a rapidly growing evangelical movement in Brazil, challenging Catholicism for religious supremacy.
Despite all of that, in 2003, first a Brazilian immigration court and then the Brazilian Government itself -- with very little fanfare or controversy -- formally extended immigration rights (.pdf) to the same-sex partners of its citizens. That was done not on ideological but on purely humanitarian grounds. The most basic human decency should preclude support for a legal framework which forces one's fellow citizens to either leave the country or break apart their most central and intimate relationship.
In the U.S., with the Democrats in control of Congress and the White House, there is no viable political excuse for failing to pass this corrective legislation. The bill has 90 co-sponsors in the House and 15 in the Senate. Obama made the repeal of the entire Defense of Marriage Act a part of his winning presidential campaign, and extending full civil union rights to same-sex couples has been a position he has long explicitly advocated. And a majority of Americans -- that's a majority, for those of you eager to claim that doing this is too politically risky for Obama -- support full-scale civil union rights for same-sex couples, let alone the limited right this bill would extend. Among the litany of legal inequalities to which gay Americans are subjected, the denial of immigration rights for their foreign partners is among the most blatantly unjust, destructive, and outright punitive.
UPDATE: Just to clarify in response to emails and comments: my own personal situation is perfectly fine. I mentioned it only as a matter of disclosure and to explain why I don't write about this topic more frequently, not to hold it up as a particularly compelling example. It isn't. As I indicated, some people who are put into this predicament end up being quite lucky because their spouse's country offers immigration rights to same-sex couples and they are able to earn a living while living largely outside of the U.S., and thus end up being able to create a perfectly fulfilling life with their spouse. Living in another country is not an inherent punishment. To the contrary, there can be substantial value in it (even if one does it due to compulsion rather than choice), and as anyone who has ever visited Brazil will be quick to explain, residence in Rio de Janeiro is anything but a tragic plight.
But no matter how lucky one ends up being, being forced to choose between one's country and one's most central relationship -- being, in essence, barred from living in one's own country -- is a grave injustice. Even under the best of circumstances, there are burdens and limitations imposed. But the point is that huge numbers of Americans in that situation -- probably most -- are not lucky. Quite the contrary: they are unable to live in their spouse's country for any number of reasons, and are thus forced to live apart from the person who is most important to them, while others are forced into very risky or otherwise untenable predicaments (living in the U.S. illegally, entering sham marriages, making huge sacrifices of career, livelihood and family to live abroad) in order to be with the person they love. It's an inhumane and discriminatory legal framework that is purely punitive, has no conceivable value or justification, and imposes profound hardship on people who have done absolutely nothing to deserve it.
UPDATE II: An email from reader TF:
Glenn,
I just wanted to drop you a line and express my deepest, most profound gratitude that you decided to highlight this issue. As is evident by many of the commenters, this is something that almost no one thinks about or even knows about and when you're someone who is affected by it, that can make for some lonely moments as you try to get a handle on your problems.
My husband of 13 years is also Brazilian and since his work visa expired 6 years ago, we've been living both in fear and in debt. Whatever savings we had were wiped out in our futile attempts to find some way - any way - for him to stay in this country legally. Well, it didn't work out (no surprise) and since he is adamant about never wanting to live in Brazil again (for a variety of reasons), here we are. I never thought I'd use this word to describe myself but with the loss of his earnings and the frantic attempts to fix the situation, we are pretty much destitute.
Poverty, I can live with. It's ultimately, for someone like myself (white, educated, middle class background) a solvable situation even if most days that road seems unbearably long. It's the fear and the sadness that is so devastating. Fear that he will somehow be found out and taken away from me and sadness because his family back home is poor and has little opportunity to travel, so he hasn't seen his father or brother in 14 years and has only seen his mother twice in that time. His parents are getting older and always in the back of my mind, I have a cold dread of the day when one of them gets sick or ultimately passes away because psychologically, I have no idea how he's going to be able to handle that or how I'm going to be able to help him through that. In addition, because he can't legally work here, his earnings are practically nil and like many people, that is devastating to his pride and self worth.
I don't know why I'm telling you all this. It's certainly not something you're naive about or need to be told about. I guess I just wanted to tell you how gratifying it was to see someone highlight this issue, especially someone who is so good at explaining complex legal and political issues to his readers. Even better, you're someone who is personally affected by it. You do great work and I wouldn't expect you to become a spokesperson for this sort of thing, but I would urge you to consider writing about it again when circumstances warrant. People just don't know about this and in my experience, even people who are adamantly opposed to gay marriage find this to be cruel and untenable.
So, thank you. For a moment yesterday I didn't feel quite so lonely just knowing that people were gaining an understanding of the issue.
Best Regards,
XXX XXXXX
There are thousands of stories like that as a result of this law. It's hard to imagine anyone other than the most malicious extremists defending it.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/200...16/immigration/
America's inhumane immigration inequality
(updated below - Update II)
The Washington Post Editorial Page today urges support for a pending bill that would grant gay American citizens the right to have a permanent visa issued to their foreign national spouses (a right which, thanks to the Defense of Marriage Act, only heterosexual Americans currently enjoy):
The Uniting American Families Act would allow gay and lesbian Americans and permanent residents to sponsor their foreign-born partners for legal residency in the United States. The bill, introduced last month in the Senate by Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and in the House by Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), would add "permanent partner" and "permanent partnership" after the words "spouse" and "marriage" in relevant sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act. If passed, it would right a gross unfairness. . . .
The strain of the status quo on gay and lesbian binational couples should not be discounted. Because their relationships are not legally recognized by the United States, some couples have resorted to illegal marriages where the foreign nationals marry Americans to get green cards that allow them to stay in the country permanently. In other cases, Americans have exiled themselves to be with their partners. Sixteen countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the United Kingdom, allow residents to sponsor same-sex permanent partners for legal immigration. American gays and lesbians should not have to choose between their country and their partners.
This is an issue that directly and personally affects me: my partner is Brazilian and unable to get a visa to live in the U.S., which means our only option for living together is to live in Brazil, as that country (like many civilized Western countries, but unlike the U.S.) issues permanent visas to the same-sex partners of their citizens. For that reason, I tend not write about this issue, because that sort of direct investment can preclude dispassionate analysis. But just consider how grave is the injustice imposed by the current state of American law in this regard.
American citizens who marry a foreign national of the opposite sex are entitled to receive, more or less automatically, a Green Card for their spouse so they can live together in the United States. By rather stark contrast, gay American citizens who enter into a spousal relationship with a foreign national have (at most) two legal choices, both horrible:
(1) Live in the U.S., but remain permanently separated -- by oceans and continents -- from the person with whom they want to share their life; or
(2) Live together with one’s spouse in the spouse’s country, but be prevented from living in one’s own country.
As horrible as those two choices are, those who at least have that choice are, relatively speaking, quite lucky. Many gay Americans in a relationship with a foreign national don’t even have option (2) available, either because their spouse’s country also doesn’t extend immigration rights to same-sex couples and/or because they’re unable to earn a living while residing outside of the U.S.
As a result, there are countless Americans (Human Rights Watch puts the number in the "thousands") who, by virtue of this punitive law, are literally prevented from living on the same continent as their partner. The inequality embedded in the law (and codified by DOMA) shatters families and puts people into truly horrendous predicaments. Independent of one’s views of gay marriage, who could possibly justify that? Here's just one account of many, from The Boston Globe, describing how this legal injustice wrecks people's lives for no reason.
Consider the list of countries which do grant permanent visas to the same-sex partners of their citizens (it's actually 19 nations that do so). Most of those countries do not recognize gay marriage. Many are actually quite socially conservative. Notwithstanding their social conservativism, those countries do not want to put their gay citizens in the horrific position of having to choose between their country or their partners, or worse still, be barred from living with their partner at all.
The example of Brazil is quite instructive. Until 1985, that country lived under a military dictatorship. It has the largest Catholic population of any country on the planet. It is more socially conservative even than the U.S., as evidenced by its virtually absolute, nationwide ban on abortion. The Catholic Church plays a far more influential role in Brazil's political life than in America's. As demonstrated by the recent controversy arising from a Brazilian Archbishop's vocal condemnation of the abortion of a 9-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather and faced a high risk of death if the pregnancy developed to full term (the Archbishop even excommunicated the girl, her mother, and the doctors who performed the abortion), the Catholic Church in Brazil is much more assertive and stringent in its involvement in social affairs than is true for the U.S. And there is also a rapidly growing evangelical movement in Brazil, challenging Catholicism for religious supremacy.
Despite all of that, in 2003, first a Brazilian immigration court and then the Brazilian Government itself -- with very little fanfare or controversy -- formally extended immigration rights (.pdf) to the same-sex partners of its citizens. That was done not on ideological but on purely humanitarian grounds. The most basic human decency should preclude support for a legal framework which forces one's fellow citizens to either leave the country or break apart their most central and intimate relationship.
In the U.S., with the Democrats in control of Congress and the White House, there is no viable political excuse for failing to pass this corrective legislation. The bill has 90 co-sponsors in the House and 15 in the Senate. Obama made the repeal of the entire Defense of Marriage Act a part of his winning presidential campaign, and extending full civil union rights to same-sex couples has been a position he has long explicitly advocated. And a majority of Americans -- that's a majority, for those of you eager to claim that doing this is too politically risky for Obama -- support full-scale civil union rights for same-sex couples, let alone the limited right this bill would extend. Among the litany of legal inequalities to which gay Americans are subjected, the denial of immigration rights for their foreign partners is among the most blatantly unjust, destructive, and outright punitive.
UPDATE: Just to clarify in response to emails and comments: my own personal situation is perfectly fine. I mentioned it only as a matter of disclosure and to explain why I don't write about this topic more frequently, not to hold it up as a particularly compelling example. It isn't. As I indicated, some people who are put into this predicament end up being quite lucky because their spouse's country offers immigration rights to same-sex couples and they are able to earn a living while living largely outside of the U.S., and thus end up being able to create a perfectly fulfilling life with their spouse. Living in another country is not an inherent punishment. To the contrary, there can be substantial value in it (even if one does it due to compulsion rather than choice), and as anyone who has ever visited Brazil will be quick to explain, residence in Rio de Janeiro is anything but a tragic plight.
But no matter how lucky one ends up being, being forced to choose between one's country and one's most central relationship -- being, in essence, barred from living in one's own country -- is a grave injustice. Even under the best of circumstances, there are burdens and limitations imposed. But the point is that huge numbers of Americans in that situation -- probably most -- are not lucky. Quite the contrary: they are unable to live in their spouse's country for any number of reasons, and are thus forced to live apart from the person who is most important to them, while others are forced into very risky or otherwise untenable predicaments (living in the U.S. illegally, entering sham marriages, making huge sacrifices of career, livelihood and family to live abroad) in order to be with the person they love. It's an inhumane and discriminatory legal framework that is purely punitive, has no conceivable value or justification, and imposes profound hardship on people who have done absolutely nothing to deserve it.
UPDATE II: An email from reader TF:
Glenn,
I just wanted to drop you a line and express my deepest, most profound gratitude that you decided to highlight this issue. As is evident by many of the commenters, this is something that almost no one thinks about or even knows about and when you're someone who is affected by it, that can make for some lonely moments as you try to get a handle on your problems.
My husband of 13 years is also Brazilian and since his work visa expired 6 years ago, we've been living both in fear and in debt. Whatever savings we had were wiped out in our futile attempts to find some way - any way - for him to stay in this country legally. Well, it didn't work out (no surprise) and since he is adamant about never wanting to live in Brazil again (for a variety of reasons), here we are. I never thought I'd use this word to describe myself but with the loss of his earnings and the frantic attempts to fix the situation, we are pretty much destitute.
Poverty, I can live with. It's ultimately, for someone like myself (white, educated, middle class background) a solvable situation even if most days that road seems unbearably long. It's the fear and the sadness that is so devastating. Fear that he will somehow be found out and taken away from me and sadness because his family back home is poor and has little opportunity to travel, so he hasn't seen his father or brother in 14 years and has only seen his mother twice in that time. His parents are getting older and always in the back of my mind, I have a cold dread of the day when one of them gets sick or ultimately passes away because psychologically, I have no idea how he's going to be able to handle that or how I'm going to be able to help him through that. In addition, because he can't legally work here, his earnings are practically nil and like many people, that is devastating to his pride and self worth.
I don't know why I'm telling you all this. It's certainly not something you're naive about or need to be told about. I guess I just wanted to tell you how gratifying it was to see someone highlight this issue, especially someone who is so good at explaining complex legal and political issues to his readers. Even better, you're someone who is personally affected by it. You do great work and I wouldn't expect you to become a spokesperson for this sort of thing, but I would urge you to consider writing about it again when circumstances warrant. People just don't know about this and in my experience, even people who are adamantly opposed to gay marriage find this to be cruel and untenable.
So, thank you. For a moment yesterday I didn't feel quite so lonely just knowing that people were gaining an understanding of the issue.
Best Regards,
XXX XXXXX
There are thousands of stories like that as a result of this law. It's hard to imagine anyone other than the most malicious extremists defending it.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/200...16/immigration/
So we should continue to hire companies like Blackwater to kill Muslims and hire Faith-based organizations to help undocumented Christians to sneak into the country and protect them once they are here. The US government has no business considering whether our Immigration policy and practices are sufficiently Christian. All persons who represent the US government are obligated to
treat all human beings in a humanitarian manner.
treat all human beings in a humanitarian manner.
QUOTE(rla @ Aug 5 2009, 07:29 AM) 
So we should continue to hire companies like Blackwater to kill Muslims and hire Faith-based organizations to help undocumented Christians to sneak into the country and protect them once they are here. The US government has no business considering whether our Immigration policy and practices are sufficiently Christian. All persons who represent the US government are obligated to treat all human beings in a humanitarian manner.
Hmm.
That is an interesting extrapolation....because our immigration policy is inhumane...the solution must be to stop hiring Blackwater to supposedly kill Muslims...which I did not realize they were hired to do...I believe they act as security to different personnel some of them Iraqi -- and when pressed with a threat they act to eliminate that threat...if they act inappropriately they are no longer immune from prosecution....
Now, where you see this as "killing Muslims" -- well if Catholics or Jews in Iraq were presenting a security threat they would be disarmed as well...
I never ciontended that the US government was under an obligation to develop a Christian immigration policy, I was only making the observation that for a majority Christian nation --- many of whose strongest xenophobes are on the religious right...our public policy in this regard does not reflect our supposed Christian vales.
I also wanted to call attention to the fact that our present policies -- were to a great extent inhumane -- and contradictory to many of the values under which this nation was founded...
When have we (and who is the we) ever "hired" faith-based companies to sneak undocumented Christians across the border and protect them?
I think you are letting your emotions get the better of you here...
Good to see Obama doing this..another of my recommendations...
It is offensive that we as a nation with the highest standard of living should treat pesons in these detention centers in such an inhumane way...
August 6, 2009
U.S. to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants
By NINA BERNSTEIN
NEW YORK TIMES
The Obama administration intends to announce an ambitious plan on Thursday to overhaul the much-criticized way the nation detains immigration violators, trying to transform it from a patchwork of jail and prison cells to what its new chief called a “truly civil detention system.”
Details are sketchy, and even the first steps will take months or years to complete. They include reviewing the federal government’s contracts with more than 350 local jails and private prisons, with an eye toward consolidating many detainees in places more suitable for noncriminals facing deportation — some possibly in centers built and run by the government.
The plan aims to establish more centralized authority over the system, which holds about 400,000 immigration detainees over the course of a year, and more direct oversight of detention centers that have come under fire for mistreatment of detainees and substandard — sometimes fatal — medical care.
One move starts immediately: the government will stop sending families to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a former state prison near Austin, Tex., that drew an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit and scathing news coverage for putting young children behind razor wire.
“We’re trying to move away from ‘one size fits all,’ ” John Morton, who heads the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as assistant secretary of homeland security, said in an interview on Wednesday. Detention on a large scale must continue, he said, “but it needs to be done thoughtfully and humanely.”
Hutto, a 512-bed center run for profit by the Corrections Corporation of America under a $2.8 million-a-month federal contract, was presented as a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s tough approach to immigration enforcement when it opened in 2006. The decision to stop sending families there — and to set aside plans for three new family detention centers — is the Obama administration’s clearest departure from its predecessor’s immigration enforcement policies.
So far, the new administration has embraced many of those policies, expanding a program to verify worker immigration status that has been widely criticized, bolstering partnerships between federal immigration agents and local police departments, and rejecting a petition for legally binding rules on conditions in immigration detention.
But Mr. Morton, a career prosecutor, said he was taking a new philosophical approach to detention — that the system’s purpose was to remove immigration violators from the country, not imprison them, and that under the government’s civil authority, detention is aimed at those who pose a serious risk of flight or danger to the community.
Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said last week that she expected the number of detainees to stay the same or grow slightly. But Mr. Morton added that the immigration agency would consider alternative ways to assure that those who face deportation — and are not dangerous — do not flee.
Reviewing and redesigning all facilities, programs and standards will be the task of a new Office of Detention Policy and Planning, he said. Dora Schriro, special adviser to Ms. Napolitano, will become the director, assisted by two experts on detention management and medical care. The agency will also form two advisory boards of community groups and immigrant advocates, one focusing on detention policies and practices, the other on detainee health care.
Mr. Morton said he would appoint 23 detention managers to work in the 23 largest detention centers, including several run by private companies, to ensure that problems are promptly fixed. He is reorganizing the agency’s inspection unit into three regional operations, renaming it the Office of Detention Oversight, and making its agents responsible for investigating detainee grievances as well as conducting routine and random checks.
“A lot of this exists already,” he said. “A lot of it is making it work better” while Dr. Schriro’s office redesigns the detention system, which he called “disjointed” and “very much dependent on excess capacity in the criminal justice system.”
Asked if his vision could include building new civil detention centers, he said yes. The current 32,000-bed network costs $2.4 billion a year, but the agency is not ready to calculate the cost of a revamped system.
Vanita Gupta, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who led the lawsuit against the Hutto center, was jubilant over the decision to stop sending families there, but cautious about the other measures.
“The ending of family detention at Hutto is welcome news and long overdue,” she said in an e-mail message. “However, without independently enforceable standards, a reduction in beds, or basic due process before people are locked up, it is hard to see how the government’s proposed overhaul of the immigration detention system is anything other than a reorganization or renaming of what was in place before.”
Ms. Gupta said the changes at Hutto since 2006 illustrated the importance of enforceable rules. Before the A.C.L.U. lawsuit was settled in 2007, some children under 10 stayed as long as a year, mainly confined to family cells with open toilets, with only one hour of schooling a day. Children told of being threatened by guards with separation from their parents, many of them asylum-seekers from around the world.
Only through judicial enforcement of the settlement, she said, have children been granted such liberties as wearing pajamas at night and taking crayons into family cells. The settlement also required the agency to honor agency standards that had been ignored, like timely reviews of the decision to detain a family at all. Some families have been deported, but others were released or are now awaiting asylum decisions in housing run by nonprofit social service agencies.
That kind of stepped-up triage could be part of the more civil detention system envisioned by Mr. Morton and Dr. Schriro, who has been reviewing the detention system for months and is expected to report her recommendations soon.
But the Hutto case also points to the limits of their approach, advocates say. Under the settlement, parents and children accused of immigration violations were detained when possible at the country’s only other family detention center, an 84-bed former nursing home in Leesport, Pa., called the Berks Family Shelter Care Facility. The number detained at Hutto has dropped sharply, to 127 individuals from as many as 450.
Advocates noted that Berks, though eclipsed by the criticism of Hutto — the subject of protest vigils, a New Yorker article and a documentary — also has a history of problems, like guards who disciplined children by sending them across the parking lot to a juvenile detention center, and families’ being held for two years.
The Hutto legal settlement expires Aug. 29. In the most recent monitoring report last month, Magistrate Judge Andrew W. Austin wrote: “Although the use of this facility to hold families is not a violation of the settlement agreement, it seems fundamentally wrong to house children and their noncriminal parents this way. We can do better.”
Mr. Morton, a career prosecutor, seemed to agree. Hutto will be converted into an immigration jail for women, he said, adding: “I’m not ruling out the possibility of detaining families. But Berks is the better facility for that. Hutto is not the long-term answer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/us/polit...agewanted=print
It is offensive that we as a nation with the highest standard of living should treat pesons in these detention centers in such an inhumane way...
August 6, 2009
U.S. to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants
By NINA BERNSTEIN
NEW YORK TIMES
The Obama administration intends to announce an ambitious plan on Thursday to overhaul the much-criticized way the nation detains immigration violators, trying to transform it from a patchwork of jail and prison cells to what its new chief called a “truly civil detention system.”
Details are sketchy, and even the first steps will take months or years to complete. They include reviewing the federal government’s contracts with more than 350 local jails and private prisons, with an eye toward consolidating many detainees in places more suitable for noncriminals facing deportation — some possibly in centers built and run by the government.
The plan aims to establish more centralized authority over the system, which holds about 400,000 immigration detainees over the course of a year, and more direct oversight of detention centers that have come under fire for mistreatment of detainees and substandard — sometimes fatal — medical care.
One move starts immediately: the government will stop sending families to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a former state prison near Austin, Tex., that drew an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit and scathing news coverage for putting young children behind razor wire.
“We’re trying to move away from ‘one size fits all,’ ” John Morton, who heads the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as assistant secretary of homeland security, said in an interview on Wednesday. Detention on a large scale must continue, he said, “but it needs to be done thoughtfully and humanely.”
Hutto, a 512-bed center run for profit by the Corrections Corporation of America under a $2.8 million-a-month federal contract, was presented as a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s tough approach to immigration enforcement when it opened in 2006. The decision to stop sending families there — and to set aside plans for three new family detention centers — is the Obama administration’s clearest departure from its predecessor’s immigration enforcement policies.
So far, the new administration has embraced many of those policies, expanding a program to verify worker immigration status that has been widely criticized, bolstering partnerships between federal immigration agents and local police departments, and rejecting a petition for legally binding rules on conditions in immigration detention.
But Mr. Morton, a career prosecutor, said he was taking a new philosophical approach to detention — that the system’s purpose was to remove immigration violators from the country, not imprison them, and that under the government’s civil authority, detention is aimed at those who pose a serious risk of flight or danger to the community.
Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said last week that she expected the number of detainees to stay the same or grow slightly. But Mr. Morton added that the immigration agency would consider alternative ways to assure that those who face deportation — and are not dangerous — do not flee.
Reviewing and redesigning all facilities, programs and standards will be the task of a new Office of Detention Policy and Planning, he said. Dora Schriro, special adviser to Ms. Napolitano, will become the director, assisted by two experts on detention management and medical care. The agency will also form two advisory boards of community groups and immigrant advocates, one focusing on detention policies and practices, the other on detainee health care.
Mr. Morton said he would appoint 23 detention managers to work in the 23 largest detention centers, including several run by private companies, to ensure that problems are promptly fixed. He is reorganizing the agency’s inspection unit into three regional operations, renaming it the Office of Detention Oversight, and making its agents responsible for investigating detainee grievances as well as conducting routine and random checks.
“A lot of this exists already,” he said. “A lot of it is making it work better” while Dr. Schriro’s office redesigns the detention system, which he called “disjointed” and “very much dependent on excess capacity in the criminal justice system.”
Asked if his vision could include building new civil detention centers, he said yes. The current 32,000-bed network costs $2.4 billion a year, but the agency is not ready to calculate the cost of a revamped system.
Vanita Gupta, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who led the lawsuit against the Hutto center, was jubilant over the decision to stop sending families there, but cautious about the other measures.
“The ending of family detention at Hutto is welcome news and long overdue,” she said in an e-mail message. “However, without independently enforceable standards, a reduction in beds, or basic due process before people are locked up, it is hard to see how the government’s proposed overhaul of the immigration detention system is anything other than a reorganization or renaming of what was in place before.”
Ms. Gupta said the changes at Hutto since 2006 illustrated the importance of enforceable rules. Before the A.C.L.U. lawsuit was settled in 2007, some children under 10 stayed as long as a year, mainly confined to family cells with open toilets, with only one hour of schooling a day. Children told of being threatened by guards with separation from their parents, many of them asylum-seekers from around the world.
Only through judicial enforcement of the settlement, she said, have children been granted such liberties as wearing pajamas at night and taking crayons into family cells. The settlement also required the agency to honor agency standards that had been ignored, like timely reviews of the decision to detain a family at all. Some families have been deported, but others were released or are now awaiting asylum decisions in housing run by nonprofit social service agencies.
That kind of stepped-up triage could be part of the more civil detention system envisioned by Mr. Morton and Dr. Schriro, who has been reviewing the detention system for months and is expected to report her recommendations soon.
But the Hutto case also points to the limits of their approach, advocates say. Under the settlement, parents and children accused of immigration violations were detained when possible at the country’s only other family detention center, an 84-bed former nursing home in Leesport, Pa., called the Berks Family Shelter Care Facility. The number detained at Hutto has dropped sharply, to 127 individuals from as many as 450.
Advocates noted that Berks, though eclipsed by the criticism of Hutto — the subject of protest vigils, a New Yorker article and a documentary — also has a history of problems, like guards who disciplined children by sending them across the parking lot to a juvenile detention center, and families’ being held for two years.
The Hutto legal settlement expires Aug. 29. In the most recent monitoring report last month, Magistrate Judge Andrew W. Austin wrote: “Although the use of this facility to hold families is not a violation of the settlement agreement, it seems fundamentally wrong to house children and their noncriminal parents this way. We can do better.”
Mr. Morton, a career prosecutor, seemed to agree. Hutto will be converted into an immigration jail for women, he said, adding: “I’m not ruling out the possibility of detaining families. But Berks is the better facility for that. Hutto is not the long-term answer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/us/polit...agewanted=print
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 6 2009, 12:16 PM)
QUOTE(rla @ Aug 5 2009, 07:29 AM)
So we should continue to hire companies like Blackwater to kill Muslims and hire Faith-based organizations to help undocumented Christians to sneak into the country and protect them once they are here. The US government has no business considering whether our Immigration policy and practices are sufficiently Christian. All persons who represent the US government are obligated to treat all human beings in a humanitarian manner.
Hmm.
That is an interesting extrapolation....because our immigration policy is inhumane...the solution must be to stop hiring Blackwater to supposedly kill Muslims...which I did not realize they were hired to do...I believe they act as security to different personnel some of them Iraqi -- and when pressed with a threat they act to eliminate that threat...if they act inappropriately they are no longer immune from prosecution....
Now, where you see this as "killing Muslims" -- well if Catholics or Jews in Iraq were presenting a security threat they would be disarmed as well...
I never ciontended that the US government was under an obligation to develop a Christian immigration policy, I was only making the observation that for a majority Christian nation --- many of whose strongest xenophobes are on the religious right...our public policy in this regard does not reflect our supposed Christian vales.
I also wanted to call attention to the fact that our present policies -- were to a great extent inhumane -- and contradictory to many of the values under which this nation was founded...
When have we (and who is the we) ever "hired" faith-based companies to sneak undocumented Christians across the border and protect them?
I think you are letting your emotions get the better of you here...
See thread concerning the investigation of Blackwater founder.
QUOTE(rla @ Aug 6 2009, 02:39 PM)
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 6 2009, 12:16 PM)
QUOTE(rla @ Aug 5 2009, 07:29 AM)
So we should continue to hire companies like Blackwater to kill Muslims and hire Faith-based organizations to help undocumented Christians to sneak into the country and protect them once they are here. The US government has no business considering whether our Immigration policy and practices are sufficiently Christian. All persons who represent the US government are obligated to treat all human beings in a humanitarian manner.
Hmm.
That is an interesting extrapolation....because our immigration policy is inhumane...the solution must be to stop hiring Blackwater to supposedly kill Muslims...which I did not realize they were hired to do...I believe they act as security to different personnel some of them Iraqi -- and when pressed with a threat they act to eliminate that threat...if they act inappropriately they are no longer immune from prosecution....
Now, where you see this as "killing Muslims" -- well if Catholics or Jews in Iraq were presenting a security threat they would be disarmed as well...
I never ciontended that the US government was under an obligation to develop a Christian immigration policy, I was only making the observation that for a majority Christian nation --- many of whose strongest xenophobes are on the religious right...our public policy in this regard does not reflect our supposed Christian vales.
I also wanted to call attention to the fact that our present policies -- were to a great extent inhumane -- and contradictory to many of the values under which this nation was founded...
When have we (and who is the we) ever "hired" faith-based companies to sneak undocumented Christians across the border and protect them?
I think you are letting your emotions get the better of you here...
See thread concerning the investigation of Blackwater founder.
Can you provide a link please?
OK - just because the Blackwater founder may be a racist -- and Blackwater may be acting badly -- does that necessarily mean as you allege that they were hired to kill Muslims?
You see because your statement is not so much a condemnation of Blackwater as it is of the US for hiring a company for the stated purpose of in effect committing a form of genocide -- seeking to eliminate a group of peoples not based upon the fact that they are our enemy or pose a risk to us -- but merely because they are "Muslims".
Now, Blackwater may be acting badly...but they were not "hired" to kill Muslims.
Indeed, that may be what they are doing...but that is not what they were hired to do...which is why they are being investigated...
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