A Long Look in the Mirror

Last Friday night around 11:30 PM, an unidentified Latino man walked down Division Avenue in Patchogue NY.

As he approached the intersection of Division and West Avenues, three white teens hanging out in a nearby parking lot called out to him. Seconds later he was struck in the face, knocked to the ground, and as the teens shouted racial slurs, robbed of cash and other personal items. .... Just another case of "beaner hopping" in Long Island's Suffolk County.

Nine months earlier, within a stones throw of last Friday's incident, Marcelo Lucero was walking with a friend, minding his own business, when seven teens decided he would be their next, and final, victim in a long night of physical harassment of Latino neighbors played out as sport by the gang of marauding racist youths.

Within moments, Lucero lay on the ground bleeding to death from stab wounds….wounds inflicted as part of a sick, racist, game.

Despite international outrage, investigations by Justice Department, changes in police personnel, and various other attempts to stem the tide of anti-Latino violence in an area so notorious for its racist attacks that the Mexican government has long warned travelers to avoid it, the attacks obviously continue.

But, should we really be surprised.

What has really changed since that night back in early November when Marcelo Lucero's life oozed out onto the cold Long Island pavement?

The Hope? …The Change We Can Believe In? … The chants of Sí Se Puede and the promises made with them? … The awakening of the "Sleeping Giant" that drove Latinos and immigrant communities to the polls in record numbers? … The election of a black man, the child of an immigrant?

All of this has meant nothing to those held in the tentacles of the ever-expanding immigrant detention industry.

It's meant nothing to those profiled by local authorities at traffic stops and street corners around the country.

It’s meant nothing to those hoping against hope that they, or love ones, can simply live their lives without fear of deportation.

It’s done nothing to protect those who only want to work and make a better life for themselves and families, free from exploitation and abuse.

And most of all, it has done nothing to stem the tsunami of violence and hate that has afflicted this nation for years.

It's easy for Liberals, Progressives, and left-leaning media types, to point self-righteously at the obvious knuckle-draggers that lead the charge against social change and a more equitable society.

From the "birthers" to Sarah Palin, to Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck and a new generation of "dixiecrat" politicos from deep red states, the easy targets are abundant.

They're painted as ignorant, hypocritical, hillbilly, hold-backs, who represent not the views of the majority … but a small, yet vocal, minority of dinosaurs riling against the inevitable march of time.

Yet, these same Liberals and Progressives, so smug and self-righteous, fail to look in the mirror for even a moment to see that they are just as much responsible for events like those that happened in Patchogue, as any hirsute hillbilly or plasticized pitchman from the far-right.

They have not only accepted the racist frames and exclusionary rhetoric of the right on issues of immigration and immigration reform, they have embraced them.

When Rahm Emanuel(the son of an Israeli immigrant) first uttered his famous statement that "immigration is the third rail" of politics and should be avoided for political expediency, and that only a get-tough message would assure electoral victory, he telegraphed not just capitulation to the right, but willingness to accept their worldview.

We now see that the acceptance of the "immigrant as criminal" philosophy so prevalent on the right has morphed into the "get-tough" policies of the Obama administration and its surrogates like Chuck Schumer.

While Obama and his DHS move to increase raids, deportations and detentions in hopes of ploughing the way for legislative compromise, Schumer embraces the rhetoric of the right and calls for not only get-tough measures, but acceptance of terminology that reinforces the idea of the undocumented immigrant as criminal interloper

The first of these seven principles is that illegal immigration is wrong—plain and simple. When we use phrases like “undocumented workers,” we convey a message to the American people that their Government is not serious about combating illegal immigration….

… Above all else, the American people want their Government to be serious about protecting the public, enforcing the rule of law, and creating a rational system of legal immigration…

… People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens, and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who entered the United States legally….

… Second, any immigration solution must recognize that we must do as much as we can to gain operational control of our borders as soon as possible. ….

…. Third, we must recognize that illegal immigration will never seriously be stifled unless and until we end the job magnet currently engendered by the seriously flawed I-9 regime. As we speak, any individual who steals a social security number and has access to a credible fake ID can get a job in the United States. ….

… Only by creating a biometric-based federal employment verification system will both employers and employees have the peace of mind that all employment relationships are both lawful and proper….

SCHUMER ANNOUNCES PRINCIPLES FOR COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM BILL

Clearly, the talking points first rolled out by the right during the Sensenbrenner legislation battle four years ago are not just still being thrown around … but have now somehow morphed into a "liberal," pro-reform platform. …a platform accepted not only inside and outside the beltway by both politicos and advocacy groups, but by the broader, supposedly left-leaning, universe.

We hear little push-back against this acceptance of "immigrant as criminal" framing outside of ethnic media and the "bomb-throwers" of the Latino/ pro-migrant blogosphere.

But until the broader progressive movement starts to reexamine its honeymoon with Obama's immigration policies and more importantly takes a long look in the mirror to see where their acceptance will lead, the growing pattern of violence like that in Patchogue will be just as much on their heads as those of the knuckle-dragging bigots who at least wear their racism on their sleeves for all to see.

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Better Have Your Papers In Order: New Immigration Legislation Targets Millions of US Workers

By all accounts, the failure of the "immigration issue" to deliver at the polls for the Republican Party should have sounded the death knell for any attempts at passing get-tough legislation in Washington before this year's election cycle was over.

With McCain as the presumptive nominee, one would think that down-ticket Republicans wouldn't want to re-hash the "immigration wars" and put their candidate in a position where he would have to once again revisit the issue.

But then again, that would assume that politics is based upon logic and McCain isn't more than willing to even further pander to anti-immigrant sentiment despite his previous record.

Facing the specter of having to run on their accomplishments over the last eight years, nervous Republicans are scrambling for an issue to distract the electorate from their records. With that in mind, The House Immigration Reform Caucus, now under the of leadership Brian Bilbray, an ex- lobbyist for the hate group FAIR, has gone back to beat a dead horse in an attempt to get an election year distraction on the Congressional agenda.

Back in November, Bilbray, with the help of freshman, red-state Democrat, Heath Shuler, introduced the newest incarnation of the House's failed enforcement-only style legislation; The Secure America through Verification and Enforcement (“SAVE Act”) of 2007 (H.R. 4088).

Normally, a bill that would put the jobs of over 12.7 million US citizens in direct jeopardy, force a possible 2.5 million a year to be classified as unauthorized to work, criminalize the work of churches and humanitarian groups - mandating penalties up to 5 years imprisonment, and force all local law enforcement to become immigration agents.. all in the name of attrition and deportation.. would be rejected out of hand by Congressional Democrats.

But, thanks to the work of Rahm Emanuel and other quisling Dems, it's moving closer to enactment.

The bill itself is chock full of flaws and outrages.

The right-wing, zero-immigration group, NumbersUSA, rightfully touts the bill as an "Attrition Through Enforcement" effort. According to the group, the bill's goal is to "make it extremely difficult for unauthorized persons to live and work in the United States. (So) they will buy their own bus or plane tickets back home if they can no longer earn a living here".

Yet, reading the bill, it's obvious that its goal goes even beyond ruthlessly trying to "starve" undocumented workers out of the country. It requires local law enforcement to begin the process of mass deportations by requiring them to become immigration agents at every traffic stop and domestic dispute.

But perhaps the most troubling part of the legislation is it's reliance on the DHS's flawed Basic Pilot/E-Verify Electronic Employment Verification system, and the Social Security Administration's error-ridden "No-Match List" to determine whether millions of US workers, many US born citizens, would be eligible to earn a living.

The “SAVE Act” would:

• Require mandatory use and rapid expansion of the Basic Pilot/E-Verify Electronic Employment Verification system for all employers. The “SAVE Act” would require that within 4 years, all employers in the U.S. – approximately 6 million – use Basic Pilot/E-Verify to verify the work authorization of ALL workers – immigrant and U.S. citizen, new hires and the current workforce. Slightly more than 50,000 employers currently voluntarily use Basic Pilot for new hires – less than one percent of all employers; only 4 percent of all new hires are currently verified through Basic Pilot.

A recent independent evaluation of Basic Pilot/E-Verify concluded that employers currently using the system often misuse it, and that the system requires significant improvements before further expansion. The Basic Pilot/E-Verify system relies heavily on the Social Security Administration (SSA) database that, according to government sponsored studies, contains unacceptably high error rates. SSA estimates that 17.8 million of its records contain errors related to name, date of birth, or citizenship status, and 12.7 million of those records relate to U.S. citizens. DHS databases contain similarly high error rates. If the databases are not dramatically improved, the errors in the SSA database alone could result in 2.5 million workers a year being misidentified as unauthorized for employment or as no-matches. Workers, including U.S. citizens, will get caught in this faulty system and will lose their jobs.

The “SAVE Act” contains no assurances that government databases will be accurate and updated, no privacy protections for the vast amounts of personal information to be handled by employers, and no recourse for workers who are wrongfully denied employment. Most importantly, the “SAVE Act” will not prevent unscrupulous employers from avoiding the system by hiring undocumented workers under the table, thereby growing the informal economy.

• Greatly expand the SSA “no-match letter” program. – a program that was halted by a federal judge in 2007. A no-match occurs when the information in the SSA database does not match the information submitted by an employer on the W-2 form. There are many reasons that workers receive a no-match letter that have nothing to do with immigration, including name changes and employer error in entering data. The “SAVE Act” taps the SSA to play an unprecedented role of reporting and cooperating with the DHS by requiring the SSA to notify employers of ALL no-matches and to notify DHS of all unresolved no-matches. Workers who wrongfully receive a no-match letter will have 10 days to resolve the problem, or be fired. A judge recently found that the DHS no-match rule, which gave employers and workers 90 days to fix errors, placed a large burden on employers, and may result in tremendous harm – including loss of employment – for U.S. workers.

• Link the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security to enforce immigration laws. The “SAVE Act” requires SSA to notify all employees in cases where their social security number (SSN) has been reported by two or more employers and requires those workers to prove they are using a valid SSN and are employed by multiple employers simultaneously. This would be tremendously burdensome for the many workers who hold multiple jobs, and would place additional burdens on the already overstretched and underfunded SSA, resulting in delays providing Social Security benefits to the retired and disabled.

The “SAVE Act” also requires SSA to report all unresolved no-matches and multiple use SSNs to the Department of Homeland Security, increasing the amount of personal taxpayer information about workers (including U.S. citizens) that is shared between government agencies, overriding current laws protecting the privacy of taxpayer information.

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Who would get caught up in this bureaucratic nightmare:

Why would a worker receive a no-match letter?
According to SSA, there may be several reasons why information submitted for a worker does not match SSA records, including:

• A typographical or clerical error was made on a W-4 or W-2 form (such as misspelling a name or transposing a number in the SSN)


• The worker’s name has changed due to marriage or divorce


• Information provided on the W-4 or W-2 form is incomplete


• The worker’s middle name was transposed (for example, “David Juan Jimenez” instead of “Juan David Jimenez”).

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Back In October, when U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer ruled against the DHS's implementation of it's "No Match Program" for 141,000 social security mismatches, he pointed to the SSA's inability to process the large volume of request the program would require in a timely matter (90 days,) and the number of mistakes in the SSA database as his grounds for preventing the DHS from going forward.

The Save Act not only vastly increases the numbers of workers who would need to correct their information …but cuts the time to accomplish that task down to ten days. Anyone who's every dealt with a government agency, from the Dept of Motor Vehicles to the Internal Revenue Service, knows that accuracy and timeliness are not traits generally attributed to them.

So why would 48 Democratic Representatives sign on to such a flawed piece of toxic legislation?

In one word …Rahm Emanuel.

Emanuel has long been advising vulnerable Dems to break with the party, turn their backs on Comprehensive Reform and run with a Republican-lite position on immigration to counter Republican charges of being "soft on immigration." Sources with ties close to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus confirm that Emanuel has been actively lobbying for the bill, and has gone so far as to suggest putting it up along-side the flawed STRIVE Act from last year - ensuring the passage of at least one of the bills before the election.

Emanuel, who fought against the fifty-state strategy that has been so successful in revitalizing the Democratic Party, and told Democrats who didn't take a tough stance on the "third rail" issue of immigration, that they weren't really "with the American people"… is now advising Democrats to sign on to the Republican's last-ditch, Hail-Mary, plan to salvage their faltering electoral prospects with yet another draconian, deportation, immigration bill.

Sometimes one must wonder which side of the aisle Rahm is really on.

Tell your Representative that you want Compressive Reform and not attrition and deportation ... no matter what Rahm Emanuel thinks …Stop the SAVE Act

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