Doing What America Does Best – Lying

Doing What America Does Best – Lying

Waiting in Line and Doing It Right

“They’re trying their best. They’re waiting in line…But when you have a system that was essentially designed to fail from the beginning, it’s difficult to have faith in that system.” 

 Immigration attorney John Manley addressing the impossible path to citizenship for people from countries like Mexico

Take a good look at the above map. It is what is today continental US territory looked like when we declared our independence from King George III’s Brittain. That vast swath labeled “Spanish Territory” – much of which would wind up in the United States by military victory or purchase – defined the underlying heritage of a rather large section of American history and culture. We had no issue displacing (killing) indigenous people and pushing the white Spanish rulers of old out. Soon, immigrants from Caucasian Europe moved in as if no one lived in those lands. Andrew Jackson made it clear that America was a land for those white immigrants, not the people who lived there for centuries, if not millennia.

Whenever I hear someone say, “make American white again,” I wonder where the “again” is really coming from. Racism has become legitimized to a level not seen since the era of slavery and the Jim Crow time that seems to be what the MAGA evangelical horde has in mind. But it has been the white Europeans who were the “invaders,” not the indigenous people (now mostly mixed blood) who lost their land to the real invaders. As the focus on Donald Trump’s recruitment of thousands of new ICE agents seems to use repelling “invaders” (very much including those from those former Spanish holdings) as a patriotic cause, those who understand the genuine dynamic understand that Trump is recruiting an army loyal only to him above anyone or anything (including the Constitution) else.

Even past Republican presidents from states with strong Hispanic roots, like Ronald Reagan (formerly governor of California) and George W Bush (Texas governor) have embraced legal immigration for those from south of the border, as the Republican Party slowly collapsed any legitimate efforts at “earned” immigration status for such migrants. Reagan presided over the last serious effort at immigration reform (1986), as most Republicans have since supported keeping immigration from Mexico and points south chaotic as a political rallying point against Democrats. It worked. Conspiracy theories, led by Donald Trump, labeled such potential immigrants as rapists, murderers and criminals, even though statistics showed otherwise. In a survey by the National Institute of Justice, looking at the period between 2012 and 2018, “The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.”

When senior administration officials admonish those undocumented workers to self-deport so as to preserve the right to apply for a legitimate path to US citizenship – words uttered by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem or immigration czar Tom Homan – they know that will never happen. Writing for the July 28th Los Angeles Times, Rachel Uranga crushes that mythology… hard: “John Manley is sick of people telling immigrants to ‘stand in line’ and ‘do it the right way.’

“An immigration attorney for almost three decades in Los Angeles, he said what most don’t understand is that trying to legally come into the United States is nearly impossible for people from certain nations such as Mexico… ‘People are dying in line,’ he said. In some cases, ‘it’s literally a 150-year wait.’… Manley said one of his clients, a U.S. citizen originally from Mexico who petitioned his two brothers to become legal residents, waited more than 15 years and wound up burying them instead of giving them the good news…

“Immigration laws have not seen a wholesale reform in nearly 40 years, but as the Trump administration cracks down on unauthorized migrants, politicians are seeing a window of opportunity. Economists, immigration attorneys and scholars say that without another relief valve, it is not just the immigrants who will suffer but people in a wide swath of the economy.

“Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) [introduced] legislation that could provide a path to citizenship to 11 million immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least seven years. With a Republican-led House and Senate, the legislation, which died last year, is unlikely to pass, but Padilla said he wanted to reintroduce the bill because he sensed a ‘mood shift’ in Congress and across the country… He’s not the only one. This month in the House, Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) and Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) dusted off their legislation, the Dignity Act, which would give qualified unauthorized immigrants living here before 2021 up to seven years of legal status with work authorization.

“For decades, Republicans and Democrats have tried and failed to bring reforms to what is widely viewed as an outdated system, which in the last fiscal year approved 3% of the 34.7 million pending green card applications, according to David Bier, a researcher at the Cato Institute… ‘Given the extreme overreach of the Trump administration, I believe now’s the time,’ Padilla said. ‘You talk to colleagues on both sides of the aisle about farmworkers, agricultural workers. They say that farmworkers deserve better, but the political will hasn’t been there for many, many years.’

“But the imagery of Trump’s enforcement actions against noncriminals — videos of mothers wailing as they’re separated from children and arrests of workers and vendors outside Home Depots — have seeped into the national consciousness and drawn criticism across political lines… A Gallup poll released this month showed record-high support for immigration. When asked whether immigration is generally a good thing or bad thing for the country, 79% of U.S. adults called it a good thing. And a record-low 17% viewed it as a bad thing…

“Carl Shusterman, an immigration lawyer who has been practicing since the 1970s, says he sees it every day near his home on the Westside and in his practice… ‘Go into any restaurant and look at who’s cooking the food, or you see who’s building the buildings in the fancy, fancy neighborhoods, or who’s mowing the lawns or taking care of the kids, or just pick almost any industry, and you’ll see that ... there’s no way for these people to get legalized status.’” Yet as our economy is reeling from the loss of these productive, low-cost workers, hardliner-racists like Senior Whitehouse Advisor Stephen Miller scream for more deportation, claiming efforts are removing mostly criminals from the country. In truth, 70% of those deportees have no criminal records.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while most Americans are not hypocrites or cruel, those in charge of our immigration policies are… and worse.