Kathleen Parker, who was featured in the Washington Post yesterday, calling Obama and Edwards "girly boys", also wrote the appalling article above (alliteration!!!) apparently in defense of those who think that being a "real American" means having WHITE ancestors who arrived in the U.S. before some arbitrary date, 1800 perhaps? Seriously? She begins with a quote from a young West-Virginian who says that he dislikes Obama becasue he's not a "full blooded American". As some other bloggers out there have pointed out, Obama's grandfather fought in WWII. What about that is not American? What exactly is the qualification for being a "real American"? Is she proposing, by defending this opinion, that anyone that came to the U.S. after a certain date is a doesn't belong here?
In addition to that revelation, Ms. Parker points out that understanding America is "about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots". I'd venture to say that the millions of people from around the world who apply for U.S. Visas every year, who have worked and saved for years to have enough money in their accounts to even apply to enter our country, understand commitment and the value of hard work. It is unacceptable to defend those who believe that the only true Americans are white people whose family came over on the Mayflower.
Ms. Parker also indicates that multiculturalism is evidently cause for concern for many "real Americans": "What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative". I'm sorry, but I didn't realize that multiculturalism was the new damaging trend. The U.S. has always relied on "multiculturalism" for its success: it was immigrants who created some of the most important technological advances in American history. Also, our country was literally built on the backs of slaves who were stolen from Africa. Without that "free" labor, we would not have experienced the type of rapid economic growth that occurred in the 19th century. My black and white (I'm mixed) forefathers fought and died for the values of an America that still treats me like a second class citizen because I, like Obama, don't "look" American. Ms. Parker's post proves that racism is still alive and well. It is clear that even if Obama wins the presidency, we still have a lot of work to do to become united states, instead of the ones divided, along racial/social/cultural lines, that we have been for hundreds of years.
There's a great piece today by Anabel Lee in TAP. She talks about women who are the victims of domestic abuse, but because of their status as illegal immigrants, are afraid to come forward.
While Arizona is busy overcharging illegal immigrants for going to college, Massachusetts’s Governor Duval Patrick proposed yesterday that illegal immigrants be granted in-state tuition status as long as they’ve graduated from a Massachusetts high school. Perhaps suspecting opposition, Patrick is considering implementing the measure as a unilateral action, bypassing the state’s legislature.
It seems doubtful that Arizona has thousands of illegal immigrants who are clamoring to get cheap (ha!) educations at community colleges. What this shows is that such xenophobic legislation is actually also harmful to citizens. Requiring everyone to produce proper documentation for everything we do is a bit, um, fascist.
The counter campaign is to inform students that even if students are illegal immigrants they can still attend college -- the just pay a lot more. Awesome. At least we're making a buck off the illegals.
Tonight I am working on an editorial for our Campus Progress sponsored magazine, The InterActivist. Our staff decided to deviate from AP guidelines when it comes to racial identification. After talking to professors in the diversity studies and cultural education departments, we chose to capitalize "Black" and "White" as they refer to racial identities, not just colors. Also, we chose to move away from Hispanic, as the word is imperial and colonial in itself, describing the Conquistadors that raped and pillaged the indigenous Americans. Does anyone have any ideas on these issues? Should AP style be changed? Does anyone have any language preferences? These conflicts are always so interesting to me.
You know how conservatives like to blame uninsured illegal immigrants for the rising costs of health care? Well, the Economic Policy Institute released this graph that shows change in the share of the uninsured with and without post-2000 immigration increases.* Don't you love it when you can point to a graph to prove your point?
* This post originally said this was a change in overall health care spending.
Via Ezra, a new bill in Virginia seeks to prohibit public universities from accepting undocumented students. As Ezra points out, this is a great idea because the last thing we need to is to educated immigrants and allow them to contribute to our economy. Brilliant.
On Nov. 3rd, 2004, we all heard that hackneyed phrase, and many of us even said it: “That's it; I'm moving to Canada.” Even I made the threat, though without any intention of following through. Still, with this administration in office, you gotta admit that hanging in the great white north, where same-sex marriage is legal and health care is universal, seems pretty damn appealing (and don’t you just love the Mounties and their red uniforms?).
But in all serious, it seems more Americans have been following through on that claim than ever before. According to an ABC News report,
The number of U.S. citizens who moved to Canada last year hit a 30-year high, with a 20 percent increase over the previous year and almost double the number who moved in 2000. In 2006, 10,942 Americans went to Canada, compared with 9,262 in 2005 and 5,828 in 2000, according to a survey by the Association for Canadian Studies.
Funny how those dates coincide with the years Bush has been in office…
The economic barriers of immigrating to the U.S. and becoming a citizen just got a whole lot higher.
New fees went into effect yesterday to help the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) pay for its operations. The cost for registering for permanent residence or adjusting one's status skyrocketed more than 186% to $930, more than the per capita GDP of 22 countries. Applying for naturalization rose more than 80% to $595 and the petition fee for a foreign relative exploded almost 87% to $355.
I interrupt the blogosphere’s recent obsession with America’s obsession with Paris Hilton and other imprisoned or kidnapped white women to report an act of state-sponsored terror and intimidation in New Haven, a city I have come to know and love over the past two years.
Cultural anxiety in Europe has a growing number of adults pretending to be medieval duchesses and mercenaries during leisure time fantasy lives, The New York Timesreports. One 57-year old Belgian woman sleeps in a replica of a medieval bed, spends her weekends living in a castle, and says life was less stressful before phones and vacuum cleaners. As a history major who took a few classes on medieval Europe, it's interesting to learn that Ph.D programs in the subject, usually considered quite obscure, are packed. But is there a darker side to the nostalgia for knights and ladies-in-waiting? Is such roleplaying a reaction against increased Muslim immigration to the Continent, a harkening back to a mono-cultural time? Or is it all just fun and games?
A current plot line on ABC's hit "Ugly Betty" (the most progressive show on network television) involves the travails of Ignacio Suarez, a Queens retiree with heart problems and no health insurance who is at risk of deportation even though his two daughters and grandson are all American citizens. Pegged to the recent up tick in workplace raids, today The Washington Postreports on some of the real-life families facing this dilemma. A few dozen brave kids are even lobbying on Capitol Hill for their parents' rights to remain in the country in which they've worked, paid taxes, bought real estate, and raised children.
But it's curious that reporter N.C. Aizenman writes, "Until recently, their parents' illegal status had limited impact on these children's lives." Although a number of private companies are willing to provide more financially secure illegal immigrants with services ranging from mortgages to health insurance, non-pregnant illegal immigrants and undocumented children over the age of 1 year are generally barred from Medicaid coverage -- just like Ignacio on "Ugly Betty." And children certainly are affected when their parents' health suffers.
With the risk of deportation for settled immigrant parents increasing, we're facing a moment of public reckoning. We learned from the Elián González fiasco that Americans generally oppose separating children from their parents. But that's exactly what will happen if we don't provide undocumented workers with a path toward citizenship.
Reading this story just now, my jaw literally dropped. A German judge refused to grant a woman who was being physically abused by her husband a quick divorce (that is, without the usual 1 year separation period) because—and I am serious—she is Muslim and the beating of one’s wife is “sanctioned” by the Koran.
So this judge is saying, basically, Muslim women have no reasonable right to demand protection from domestic violence because such violence is “normal” in Islam. Read More »
In Pascagoula, Mississippi, Signal International hired hundreds of guest laborers in India, promising them greencards and permanent residency, along with well-paying jobs. Many of the workers spent their life savings or even sold their houses to pay the fee for H2-B visas, but upon arriving here, were only given the temporary visas, paid half of what they were promised, and found their living conditions squalid.
About a week ago, company representatives and armed security guards raided the workers’ camp, took 6 workers, and locked them in a room, saying they would be deported to India. One of the workers, Sabu Lal, even slit his wrists hoping that his self-mutilation would keep him from deportation. He was recently interviewed on Democracy Now:
“How I can go back to India? There is nothing. My family is waiting for me to fulfill their wishes by earning something from America. They are dreaming to come to America. These guys cheated me. From India, for ’til I come here, they cheated me, and family is cheated…They are treating us like slaves. And whenever we making some comments, they are saying that ‘Just shut your mouth.’”
A Boise State University student group has angered area Hispanic leaders and others by promoting a speech about immigration with a "food stamp drawing" that requires climbing through a hole in a fence and offering fake identification for a shot at winning dinner at a local Mexican restaurant.
The group in question is the local chapter of the college Republicans. OK, I got to hand it to them, this is a more creative twist on the typical xenophobic "catch an illegal immigrant day" event that we've previously reported.
My question is this: they pull these stunts to get liberals outraged and get media attention--and it works--so is it good for them because they're setting the agenda, or good for progressives because it makes them look crazy?
59% of Americans believe that, if an undocumented worker has lived and worked in the United States for two years, he/she should be given a chance for legal citizenship rather than be deported.
While this seems like a basic issue of human compassion and smart economics, the number is far higher than I would've guessed. Maybe underneath all that conservative mouth-frothing, Lou Dobbs's Nightly Nativism, and growing economic inequality, Americans have retained a little faith in the American dream.
Via Feminist Law Professors: A Florida fruit and vegetable wholesaler will pay $215,000 to five Haitian women tomato graders who were repeatedly sexually molested and verbally harassed. Three of the workers were fired in retaliation for their complaints. The suit was initiated by the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of those saintly non-profits that each and every time you read about them, are doing God's work.
This case reminds us that discrimination and other labor abuses are always against the law -- even when workers are undocumented (it's unclear whether or not the women in this case were legal immigrants). I grew up in Ossining, New York, a de-industrialized Hudson River village that is home to Sing Sing Prison and an ever-growing Ecuadorian immigrant community, many of them undocumented day laborers. Back in Ossining, Catholic social justice volunteers associated with Marymount College did amazing pro bono legal work for undocumented Ecuadorian workers who had consistenly been denied promised wages. Depending on the region of the country in which an immigrant lives and works, there are shifting risks in pursuing this kind of justice, since most immigrants are unwilling to risk deportation.
But when such cases suceed, the progress can be meaningful for frequently-victimized populations such as migrant female agricultural workers. In the Florida settlement, Gargiulo Inc. has promised to provide Spanish and Creole language training on reporting sexual harassment, as well as adopt a written anti-sexual harassment policy.
According to a new study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, more than a quarter--and at some schools as many as half--of black college students are first or second generation immigrants, not African American descendents of slaves. Which schools' black populations are most heavily composed of immigrants? You guessed it--the Ivies. As the Brown Daily Herald reports:
The study's authors noted that once immigrant black students are enrolled in college, their performances do not differ from those whose families have a longer history in the United States. They did, however, find that immigrant blacks have distinct advantages over non-immigrants in gaining acceptance to selective colleges and universities, including statistically higher SAT scores, higher attendance of private schools and a better likelihood that one or both parents graduated from college.
Elite universities like to brag about their diversity. What this study compels, I think, is the realization (if you ever doubted it) that universities need to be doing much more to reach out to African American communities that aren't as upwardly mobile as recent immigrant families tend to be. Immigrants and children of immigrants bring important perspectives to campuses, and should also be beneficiaries of affirmative action policies. But the color of their skin doesn't let schools off the hook from aggressively recruiting students whose families are victims of generations of American racism. Of course, this is a huge challenge, especially considering the sub-par public schools so many low-income kids attend--schools that do little to prepare students for college academics. But by instituting tutoring and mentoring programs in public schools, some universities are doing their best to foster relationships that bring low-income and minority students to elite colleges.
What more can be done? Should college applications ask students to identify themselves not just by race, but by immigration status as well? Should forms distinguish between the categories of "black," "African American," "African," and the like?
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