A fired-up Mayor Bloomberg warned the U.S. “is committing national suicide” by passing the buck on implementing comprehensive immigration reform.
Bloomberg said that because federal lawmakers have failed to tackle the thorny issue, lawmakers in states like Arizona have taken matters into their own hands.
Well put. The Arizona immigration law, aside from being mean-spirited, won’t solve anything, because it targets the wrong people. But the federal government has failed completely at anything approaching coherence or effectiveness in immigration policy. So of course states, especially those most affected, will step into the void.
There are real and serious problems in Arizona with immigration. They need to be addressed. As drug cartels continue to grow in power, more violence and corruption will spill across the border, as well those fleeing from it. We need comprehensive immigration reform, not a continuation of liberals and conservatives screaming at each other.
As with the response to Hurricane Katrina, the hollowing out of the federal government is apparent, with DC increasingly unable to provide basic services. We need a change.
Drug cartels? That’s not a problem with immigration. That’s a problem caused by the insane and murderous ‘war on drugs’, the institution of prohibition, and the prison/industrial complex they are rooted in. I won’t see my friends and families treated as criminals, second class citizens, or any thing other than my full equals whether they are so-called ‘illegal’ or not. The U.S./Mexico border is a particularly sick border (as all borders generally are) to be defending or calling for a further militarization and/or sealing of. It is an imperially created border established after a brutal war of expansion (as most borders are) which has been defended through murder and inhuman brutality ever since. Nationalism belongs in the dustbin of history along with racism and sexism. And the fight, like the civil rights fight, at root, is not between ‘liberals’ and conservatives shouting at each other. It’s between those who stand for universal human liberty and equality vs. those who draw a circle around themselves (whether nationalist, racist, sexist, whatever) and seek to implement the systematic exclusion of those who stand outside of it.
Well, the drugs are coming across the borders illegally. That rancher was murdered. Hundreds of millions in laundered money for drug and human smuggling goes back to Mexico (Western Union just got fined for this.) The corruption is all both sides of the border and powerful forces want it that way.
Yes. That rancher was murdered. It’s horrible. The fruits of the ‘war on drugs’ is bitter. The Ecuadorian immigrant who was recently killed by a white racist teenager was also murdered. That’s not the point. You are ignoring what I said in my comment entirely. There is no excuse (racist, sexist, nationalist, or otherwise) for denying our fellow human beings their equal democratic rights (whether that means racial profiling, deportations, using the state to target them or people who employ them, etc) and using the racist, nativist, and/or nationalist right wing canard of turning it into an ‘immigrant issue’ because of a person who was tragically killed in the midst of the ludicrous ‘war on drugs’.
I’ve said repeatedly that marijuana should be legalized and that the Arizona law targets the wrong people.
I was down to The Rez yesterday to tend to the traditional and have a couple of beers with The Bucks. We’re finding the whole thing to be pretty darned humorous. Illegal immigrants bickering amongst themselves over illegal immigration, heh [snort] indeed.