Blase's Blog

Homeland Security

When you see millions of immigrants on the streets of the United States on May 1st, please understand that their issues are now your issues. Threats of terrorism and millions of immigrants are being used to justify new police-state measures in the United States. Coordinated mass arrests, big brother spy blimps, expanded detention centers, repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act, and suspension of habeas corpus have all been recently implemented and are ready to use against anyone in the U.S..

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) flooded Mexico with cheap subsidized US agricultural products that displaced millions of Mexican farmers. Between 2000 and 2005, Mexico lost 900,000 rural jobs and 700,000 industrial jobs, resulting in deep unemployment throughout the country.

Desperate poverty has forced millions of Mexican workers north in order to feed their families.

In the wake of 9/11, Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted workplace and home invasions across the country in an attempt to roundup so-called "illegal" immigrants. ICE justifies these raids under the rubric of keeping our homeland safe and preventing terrorism. However the real goal of these actions is to disrupt the immigrant work force in the US and replace it with a tightly regulated non-union guest-worker program.To accommodate the detention of tens of thousands of people, Homeland Security, in 2005, awarded Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root a $385 million contingency contract to build detention camps in the United States. The Military Commissions Act signed October of 2006 suspends habeas corpus rights for any person deemed by the President to be an enemy combatant. Persons so designated could be imprisoned indefinitely without rights to legal counsel or a trial. When you see those marchers next Tuesday, remember that the immigrants are marching for your rights as well as for their rights.

Thanks to Professor Peter Phillips of Sonoma State University for this information.

Be sure to listen to WORLD FOCUS on Sundays: 10:00 AM- 11:00 AM
KPFK, Los Angeles, 90.7 FM (Santa Barbara, 98.7 FM). My guests will be Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Mairead Corrigan Maguire and Gerry Condon of Project Safe Haven for troops who are resisting the war in Iraq.


Pacifica Commentary For April 25, 2007
IMMIGRATION

Commercial media would like to give you two choices. Are you for the current immigration practices or are you for a guest worker program? The correct answer is none of the above. Do not allow them to frame you into two possibilities when there are two hundred possibilities. Current immigration practices are among the most punitive, mean spirited and counterproductive in U.S. history.

Please witness the Immigration Customs Enforcement which is making militaristic raids on factories of hard working people, breaking up families and imprisoning people with the same failed tactics we have used in Iraq. This is the perfect way to make enemies and to drive substantial portions of the population underground.

What do we want? We want to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to permit parents of U.S. citizens to petition through their US citizen children under 21 years of age to avoid deportation of their parents. Corporations which are legal persons are free to move their capital throughout the world with few constraints. But people who are real and not fictitious persons are not free to move for their security and safety. Such freedom is granted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but unfortunately the United States is not complying with that international accord.

We also want to reinstate the jurisdiction of Federal Courts to review various agency decisions involving immigrants. The Federal Courts were stripped of this jurisdiction during the Clinton and Bush Administrations.

We want to support the DREAM Act, which facilitates the education of immigrant youth and legalizes a population that would be almost certain to remain residing in the US in an underground and unlawful status.

We support the CHILD CITIZEN PROTECTION ACT (HR 1176) which would allow an immigration judge to consider the well being of US citizen children before deporting the immigrant parent.

We want to ensure that all workers have the right to organize and bargain collectively and to repeal international trade agreements that simply stimulate undocumented immigration.

These are only a few of the changes necessary to make immigration laws humane.

You can view the entire proposal of the Unity Blueprint for Immigration Reform by going to Hundreds of civic and religious groups are supporting this Blueprint.

And please be sure to listen to WORLD FOCUS this Sunday at 10:00 AM on KPFK. My guests will be Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Nobel Laureate who had just been shot by the Israeli forces while at a gathering in Bilin, Palestine. Mairead was there for an international gathering on the importance of non-violence in conflict resolution. Mairead won the Nobel Peace Prize for her role in ending the violence in Northern Ireland.Gerry Condon, a Vietnam Veteran sentenced to ten years in prison for failure to serve in that war and now heading up SOLDIER SAY NO/PROJECT SAFE HAVEN.

# posted by Blase Bonpane, Ph.D. @ 9:01 AM