So I guess you also agree with the following "theorizing"....
igc.apc.org
(you might want to change the background color to read the paper)
Excerpt:
Are Undocumented Workers Being Thrown to the Wolves?
by David Bacon
SAN FRANCISCO (4/11/96) - Last week Riverside County sheriff's deputies pulled an undocumented couple out of a pickup truck, in which they were passengers fleeing a Border Patrol checkpoint. When they then beat them severely, community-based immigrant rights organizations were not surprised. They were even less surprised when, on April 6, another pickup truck full of people was chased by the Border Patrol from the same checkpoint. It crashed and seven young Mexican workers were killed.
Immigrant advocates say that undocumented workers are being treated like hunted animals. "California's Proposition 187 has never been implemented, but we're paying the price for it," Emily Goldfarb, executive director of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, comments bitterly.
For activists like Goldfarb, anti-immigrant hysteria responsible for the beating and deaths comes from the distinction which has been created between legal and illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is treated as a problem which must be corrected by measures ranging from walls and troops along the border, to the denial of education and healthcare to immigrants themselves, and finally by violence.
"With over 100 million people around the world living in countries other than those they were born in, it is a dangerous illusion to think we can remove and isolate ourselves from this global phenomenon," Goldfarb explains. "There is no law, no fence that can stand in the way of the basic human need to feed one's family, to free oneself from poverty, violence or persecution."
She cites U.N. statistics, showing that over 20 million people have been forced to leave their countries of origin, and live as immigrants in Europe. Another 16-20 million live in Africa. Immigration to North America comes in third, with 15-17 million.
About 1 million people enter the U.S. every year, and a quarter of that number leave. Yet today only about 8% of our population was born outside the country. In 1910 it was fifteen percent. But fueling anti-immigrant sentiment is a crucial difference. The immigrants of 1910 came largely from eastern and southern Europe - that is, they were white. Today, immigrants come mostly from Latin America and Asia, and Mexico in particular. They are Asian, Latino and Caribbean.
Moreover, immigrants to the U.S. come from countries where the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and U.S. economic policies have imposed austerity programs. As wages go down and unemployment rises, or prices for crops tumble, conditions improve for investment, but people also leave their homes and seek survival elsewhere.
Immigrant rights advocates say that the current climate of anti-immigrant hysteria doesn't recognize this global reality --that anti-immigrant laws passed in the U.S. have no effect on the economic pressure fueling immigration. But those laws, they say, do have an enormous impact on the lives of immigrants once they arrive in the U.S., as well as on the communities in which they live.
[snip]
And here's the cure....
amatecon.com |
