Dispelling Immigration Myths & America's Obsession with Illegals

Immigration Myth: Calling an illegal alien an "undocumented immigrant" is like calling a drug dealer an "unlicensed pharmacist". I understand that the terminology is a bit of semantics since an "illegal alien" is someone that is here in contradiction to the laws of this country. In many cases, their school, work, or travel visa has run out, and they haven't returned to their home country. Obviously in some other cases, illegal immigrants arrive here on makeshift boats or cross the US/Canada or Mexico/US borders. Nonetheless, I don't like the quote because everyone that is here in this country with the exception of the Native Americans is here because their ancestors were immigrants; many of whom came here both legally and illegally from Italy, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Scotland, Bulgaria, so forth, and so on. Prior to the mass emigrations of the 1700's-1940's many of those who emigrated to the United States in the 1600's murdered the Native Americans who were the original legal immigrants to this country and oppressed the Africans through slavery until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. That is the definition of "illegal immigration"--the displacement and/or forced subjugation of peoples who are the occupants of a geographical region. However, when most Americans speak of illegal immigration, they are stereotypically referring to "those" Mexicans and Haitians, among the poorest but hardest working immigrant groups. I have experienced both sides of the legal/illegal debate, so I'm a bit more passionate about the subject than some might be.



The United States will never seriously put "undocumented immigrants" out of this country because they are an unlimited source of cheap labor. Immigrants working on the migrant farms in Florida and working as hotel maids and housekeepers for the rich work those jobs because they can't get any other employment, despite their level of education in their home country. The owners of capital in this country love having millions of "undocumented immigrants" because they can pay them $1-2/hour to pick strawberries, oranges, tomatoes, etc., "give" them substandard migrant housing which they have to pay for (if you live in Florida you've may have seen these shacks), don't have to provide benefits, time off, education expenses, and avoid payroll taxes by paying them "under the table". Those in this country who love to talk about kicking out all the illegals would find it expensive to shop for groceries if they were paying $2/tomato instead of $.75-.85 which is probably what it would cost if the average American was performing such slave labor. Not to mention, the American workers would unionize which would drive up the price further while protecting the workers from employment abuse and work hazards which lead to on-the-job injuries.



Now I must ask, are immigrants of any ilk, not humans too? Do they not deserve to live free of the threat of death for daring to express their religious or political convictions in their home country? Do they not deserve to allow their family to enjoy a decent education and live a life better than that of their parents? Are we not all God's children? To answer "No" to these questions because of some "holier than thou", Eurocentric self-righteousness speaks to the fact that we are always looking for someone to hate because they are different or not as deserving as us. It is no longer politically correct to oppress those of African descent, so Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and the like are the "new Negroes".

The bottom line is that while certainly, being in any country illegally is against the law, we must not fault those whose purpose for getting into this country is making a better life for themselves and their families. The majority of these folks are not hardened criminals by any means. As a matter of fact, many of them have fled from political, social & economic persecution in their own countries. But once they are safely in the United States, they begin making a new life for themselves. Many of them through hard work put themselves and their children through school and work menial, back-breaking jobs which ordinary Americans would not take in order for their families to survive. As a matter of fact, immigrants to America save and send more money back to their families in their home country that in any other country in the world. with Haitian immigrants sending $1 billion abroad annually. They believe that although they may not actually possess the necessary documentation--i.e., valid visa/passport, social security card, green card, and certainly citizenship) they have the audacity to believe that the words of "The New Colossus" held inside the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island apply to them:

The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
—Emma Lazarus, 1883

For more on America's obsession with "those people" refer to my earlier blog, "Vote for US, We'll Protect You from the Immigrants (October 10, 2008)".

Appalling Palin & the RNC Mocks Community Organizers

I waited until this weekend to write this blog because I, like many others, was expecting more than what we heard from John McCain on Thursday night during his RNC Presidential nomination speech at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, MN. I'm not in the habit of breaking down VP nomination speeches simply because we don't actually vote for VP candidates whose political campaign impact is negligble. We vote for the guy at the top of the ticket. As you will see from my previous posts such as "Obama & The American Promise", I didn't blog on Biden's DNC VP nomination speech, just Obama's because I expected his speech would be more substantive with details on HOW he would do what we HOPED he would do once elected. I was not dissapointed, and neither were the 38 million viewers watching the speech at Mile High in Denver. So I thought I might do the same for the RNC, but alas John McCain succeeded in boring us to death with no new ideas, no discussion of any real solutions on home foreclosures, energy alternatives, the definition of "winning the war on terror", immigration reform, regaining trust in a bloated federal government with growing national debt, or how to pull out of a recession which saw 84,000 jobs lost in August. Because Wednesday night's Sarah Palin VP nomination speech was so full of lies and "terminological inexactitudes" about Democrats and Obama's community organizing, I am compelled to respond to her heartless speechmaking.

It shows the true heart of "compassionate" conservatism when the RNC convention audience repeatedly booed and laughed as political lightweights like former NY mayor, Rudolph "A Noun, A Verb, 9-11" Giuliani and VP nominee Sarah "As-former-mayor-of-town-of-9,000-I-ran-up-a-$20-millon-debt" Palin mocked Barack Obama for his work as a community organizer. When the Republican mouth pieces mocked community organizing as if it was nothing, they mocked millions of community organizers and activists including myself. The disdain they showed for regular people who make hard sacrifices daily in order to pull up their brother and sister goes a long way to showing the state of the Republican party and demonstrates why the RNC is bracing for another election cycle in which they are expected to lose more congressional and Senate seats than they did in 2006. Apparently, in Republican lore, politics and soldiering (especially if you became a POW in a forgotten war of 40 years ago) are the only ways one can really serve our country. Nothing else really matters, not even those less fortunate who by no fault of their own have slipped through the cracks. By the way, in regular people's talk, community organizing is:

a process by which disempowered people—most often low- and moderate income people—are brought together to act in their common self-interest. Community organizers act as area-wide coordinators of programs for different agencies in an attempt to meet community needs for health and welfare services. They also facilitate self-help programs initiated by local common-interest groups, for example, by training local leaders to analyze and solve the problems of a community. Community organizers work actively, as do other types of social workers, in community councils of social agencies and in community-action groups. At times the role of community organizers overlaps that of the social planners.

Now these are the things that Obama did on the South Side of Chicago where after graduating with his law degree at Harvard, he volunteered in helping churches and community organizations identify and assist workers who were recently unemployed when their steel mills closed down, taking their jobs, their pensions, benefits, and livelihood away without so much as a, "Thank you." Sen. Obama and others helped these men regain their self worth through vocational training so that they could in turn provide for their families.

It would take the most cynical of people to somehow deduce then that community organizing is not something to to be taken serious. I may not have the charitable pedigree of Mother Teresa, but having come from a low-income, single-parent family, I know exactly what it means to be a community organizer. After emigrating from Haiti for medical reasons, I grew up in Little Rock, AR and moved to Tampa, FL at age 10 with my adoptive mother who has been a Christian missionary to Haiti since 1969. By age 14, Ma signed me up to tutor elementary through high-school students free of charge through my neighborhood's community affairs office, the hub of community organizing in our area. (I am humbled that one of my former students is now a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England and will graduate later this month.) Our community affairs office was recognized in Tampa Bay for doing many things to lift up and provide a helping hand to inner city, low-income residents of Tampa by hosting Boy Scout and 4-H meetings, providing computer literacy tutoring, English literacy classes, GED preparation, job readiness programs, crime prevention through education, family planning and HIV/AIDS testing, scholarships for high-achieving, low-income students, government food assistance for the elderly and single-parent homes, food and clothing drives for nearby homeless shelters, among many other community projects.

My mother and I did not participate in these efforts to gain the public glory of men, but because of our efforts we did receive recognition in the local media and among community organizations such as Tampa/Hillsborough Human Rights Council, Bay Area Brotherhood, Metropolitan Ministries, Ybor City Rotary Club, and others. In the meantime, I learned the power of giving selflessly to others who could never give back in kind, how to be a leader, and the power of correct application of knowledge, and in turn my experiences assisting local leaders in community organizing granted me opportunities to meet mayors, community leaders, and movers and shakers whom I still keep in touch with. In addition I was blessed to receive Community Service awards from the Kiwanis Club during my high-school career, and induction in Omicron Delta Kappa (OΔK®) Leadership Honor Society among other groups during my college career. To those living within a few miles of the community affairs office, we were an invaluable, irreplaceable lifeline. I witnessed on a number of occasions my mother translating legal or medical documents so local Haitian and other French/Creole speakers could understand the decisions being made for and about them by various private and public agencies and the government. I saw the pride in the eyes of a single mother as she learned how to use a computer to apply for jobs--and the realization that I had helped someone was rewarding in and of itself.

Be honest, when is the last time you heard Republicans talk about helping others instead of focusing non-stop on how they could lower the tax burdens of their richest contributors? Go ahead...I'm waiting...

All of this is quite ironic, considering that during John McCain's Presidential nomination speech, he asked people to help in their communities:

If you're disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them. Enlist in our Armed Forces. Become a teacher. Enter the ministry. Run for public office. Feed a hungry child. Teach an illiterate adult to read. Comfort the afflicted. Defend the rights of the oppressed. Our country will be the better, and you will be the happier. Because nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself.

Oh but wait, isn't that what Obama did? Oh I get it, if a Democrat shows he cares about the poor instead of waiting on the rich masters of oil, media, and military, he can't possibly be trusted or hailed as "one of us" right? "...you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."