Discuss Immigration Issues with a Mexican American. Truth, Honesty and the American Way!
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Documentary Review - "Which Way Home" or How do we Secure the Borders After They've Seen Manhattan?
Do you remember the song "How you gonna keep em down on the farm, after they've seen Paris?" (click on the link to hear it) The song was referencing the boys coming back from WW1. I thought of this song as I watched a fascinating documentary on HBO yesterday entitled "Which Way Home."
The film follows several unaccompanied child migrants from Guatemala and El Salvador as they journey through Mexico en route to the U.S. on a freight train they call “ The Beast. ” When asked why they were making such a trecherous journey they said, "I want to see Manhattan!" or "I want to see Hollywood." Who can blame them. They are escaping ravaged, poverty stricken countries.
In the documentary, none of the children made it to the US. Most were caught by Mexican Immigration authorities. Contrary to what the ANTI CIR advocates say, Mexican Immigration doesn't demonize them. They catch them and send them home. The detention centers are little more than temporary safe passage back home. They are not like the disease infested, green bologna, rat infested sweltering tent cities like there are in Maricopa County and in Texas. They don't keep them for 6 months to feed the pockets of their PAC contributing crony private prison owners. They put them on a bus and send them home right away.
ICE tells us we have the lowest rate of new entries in 10 years. ICE utilizes technology to protect the border. They utilize surveillance systems and they go out and pick up the people who cross. Why incarcerate them? Just send them home. Look at their faces. The people tough enough to make the journey are kids. I've seen the surveillance videos from Border Watch groups. They are kids.
The world watches our TV, Videos and Movies. How ya gonna keep em down in their poverty stricken countries after they've seen Hollywood? We need a new song and we need a new approach for returning the newly arrived home.
The trouble with that approach is that they are back across the border sometimes within the same day. In other words, it just doesn't work effectively. I believe a six month sentence for first time offenders working on border infrastructure is just and reasonable. They should be fed and housed at least as well as they were in their homelands.
ReplyDeleteRepeat offenders and felons are another story and deserve a far greater sentence.
It is always a question of what works or what will work.
WE secure the borders with vigorous and continous internal enforcement, a six month sentence for first time offenders and longer terms for repeat offenders. That is the only way it can be done. Get on board!
ReplyDelete82%nof the respondents on Newsvine approve of Arizona's tough new immigration law. Let's all get behind it and make it work for all of us. We can do it!
ReplyDeleteUltima,
ReplyDeleteYou don't know that. ICE tells us we have the lowest rate of new entry in 10 years.
We wind up paying the crony private prison owners billions of dollars every year to house them.
It makes no sense other than to feed the pockets of the cronies. Ridiculous!
I do not understand why ANTIs are not content with just removal. Why put them in the crony owned detention centers. It makes no sense and it wastes money.
ReplyDeleteDo you enjoy punishing them and demoralizing them in vermin and disease infested hell holes?
During the Japanese Internments and Operation Wetback, those polled also approved.
ReplyDeleteDuring Civil Rights, those polled also approved of the Jim Crow laws.
When schools were first integrated, those polls objected to Integration.
Now those polled approve this racist racial profiling bill. It doesn't surprise me. We have not moved beyond our racist past.
Gays and Lesbians from Los Angeles and California boycott Arizona - No business and no travel to Arizona - They know what it is to be the underdog :
ReplyDeleteGays and Lesbians : They have been discriminated, beaten up, kicked out, harassed and stalked. They know what it is to be the underdog.
The San Fernando Valley Sun
You Bilingual Community Newspaper for the entire San Fernando Valley - This is located in Southern California, United States. More than half of the city of Los Angeles' land area lies within the San Fernando Valley.
L.A. GAY COMMUNITY-JOINS THE BOYCOTT
Written by Andres Chavez, Sun Staff Reporter
Thursday, 20 May 2010
L.A. GAY COMMUNITY-JOINS THE BOYCOTT
http://www.sanfernandosun.com/sanfernsun/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5252&Itemid=2
Some excerpts :
When Darrel Cummings learned of Arizona's new Immigration bill, he knew it was a discriminatory. As Chief of Staff of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, when he saw supporters of the bill characterize illegal immigrants as felons engaged in criminal activity, he recognized a familiar pattern. "When you do that, I think, it makes it a lot easier to hate those people and do harm to them. (It's) the same thing with us. We were labeled deviants and harmful to children, it was a lot easier for people to have permission to beat us up in the street or kill us in school, or to kick us out of our own homes," he said.
The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center decided to do something about it. On Tuesday the Center announced that it is joining the economic boycott of Arizona. Beginning on Tuesday, the center will prohibit staff travel to Arizona for conferences or other professional activities and will take steps to end all relationships with businesses headquartered in Arizona.
Cummings told the San Fernando Valley Sun/El Sol "We want to make it clear that the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgender) community is understanding of the very negative consequences of what is happening in Arizona. We are going to stand against replication of that activity here in California. Afterall, people of our community are part of the community that are going to be negatively impacted in Arizona."
The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center provides health, legal and social services. Many of its clients are San FernandoValley residents.
Youth, Minorities, Demography and Politics :
Milenials.com
Vicente Duque
Most legal scholars agree that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution has been misinterpreted, and this has resulted in the practice of birthright citizenship. Lino Graglia of the University of Texas law school wrote in the Jan. 11 Texas Review of Law & Politics that the authors of the 14th Amendment never would have imagined their words bestowing citizenship to illegal or visiting immigrants. Graglia also said, "It is difficult to imagine a more irrational and self-defeating legal system than one which makes unauthorized entry into this country a criminal offense and simultaneously provides perhaps the greatest possible inducement to illegal entry."
ReplyDeleteConstitutional and legal scholars widely agree that the 14th amendment has been misinterpreted and this misinterpretation is encouraging foreign nationals to come to the United States in order to give birth. I'm sure you agree that Congress needs to act to rectify this misinterpretation.
Please support any legislation that eliminates birthright citizenship because U.S. citizenship is too precious a commodity to acquire while on vacation.
Video of the Border : U. S. Professors : "I did not feel like a professor, or teacher, or researcher, I just felt like a human being
ReplyDeleteWalking with the "illegal immigrants" or "undocumented aliens", sleeping with them in Mexican refuges or in the desert, sharing with them. This video was filmed around Nogales, Arizona - William and Mary College, Williamsburg Virginia.
williamandmary — May 20, 2010 — Over spring break 2009, Professors Jennifer Bickham Mendez (Sociology and Latin American Studies) and Silvia Tandeciarz (Hispanic Studies) led a research team of eight students to the Tucson/Nogales region of the U.S.Mexico border.
Professor Jennifer Bickham Mendez has published articles in such journals as Social Problems, Mobilization, Labor Studies Journal, and Gender and Society. Her book From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras: Gender, Labor and Globalization in Nicaragua (2005 Duke University Press) received the 2008 Annual Book Award from the Political Economy of the World System Section of the American Sociological Association as well as an honorable mention from the Global Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Professor Silvia Tandeciarz has published these recent articles: • "Citizens of Memory: Refiguring the Past in Post-Dictatorship Argentina," PMLA (January 2007) • "Mnemonic Hauntings: Photography as Art of the Missing," Social Justice (October 2006). • "Representaciones de ‘lo femenino' en el imaginario nacional argentino pos-dictadura: el discurso cinematográfico del poder," Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos XXVIII, 2 (2004). • "Writing for Distinction? A Reading of Cortázar's Final Short Story, Diario para un cuento," Latin American Literary Review, 29:58 (July-December 2001): 73-100. Recent translations: • The Insubordination of Signs. Co-translator, with Dr. Alice Nelson, of Nelly Richard's La insubordinación de los signos. Duke University Press (Spring 2004). • Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference(s). Co-translator, with Dr. Alice Nelson, of Nelly Richard's Masculino/femenino: prácticas de la diferencia y cultura democrática. Duke University Press (Spring 2004). Creative writing: • Exorcismos. Madrid, Spain: Betania, 2000.
Borderlands: Professors explore immigration on the hyphen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBqBRPZd5Pc
Youth, Minorities, Demography and Politics :
Milenials.com
Vicente Duque