It’s a sad irony that a President who wants to unite opposing factions presides over an increasingly entrenched and partisan political landscape. There seems to be no satisfactory compromise for both the health care and immigration reform debates. Well-worn rallying cries and talking points are tooled and retooled until the root issues are nearly forgotten. The situation is tragic because the people’s needs are made secondary to an unending war between two political entities.
Alternet has the lowdown on several proposed, immigration-related amendments to the Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill. Race is an absolute contributor to these amendments. Need an example? Senator Steve King (R-IA) is shunning free-market ideology when it comes to immigrants purchasing their own health care with their own money. As author Jackie Mahendra puts it, “Free-market Steve King vs. Anti-immigrant Steve King. That pretty much sums up how absurd this debate has become.”
It is better for all of us that immigrants pay for their own insurance, and the health care bill should allow this. Mahendra notes that FAIR, an anti-immigrant organization and recognized hate group, is recruiting callers to pressure the Senate. She asks readers to take a moment to call their Senators “to oppose amendments that are bad policy for all Americans.” If you are as tired of the unceasing, empty rhetoric on these issues as I am, this seems a good way to take action.
The truth is, race very much affects our politics today, and in many ways. Wiretap’s M. Junaid Levesque-Alam writes of the increasing hostility towards President Obama, whose most raucous and visible opposition today comes from “monochromatic, middle-aged, white throngs.” Levesque-Alam concludes with some advice for the President: Remind the voters how a reformed government can affect them positively. Without this reminder, people’s anxieties and deep-seated biases are curdling into a sour and toxic brew.
Race-based irrationality and paranoia have also given birth to a new genre of infomercial, reports Talking Points Memo. Justin Elliot reports on the 28-minute Birthermercial that asks late-night viewers to “give $30 to have faxes sent to government officials demanding Obama produce his birth certificate.” Attorney Gary Kreep, is one of the men behind the below video that asks “Where was PRESIDENT Obama BORN?” According to TPM, Kreep is “engaged in an intra-movement feud with the pioneering Birther attorney Orly Taitz.”
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New America Media touches on the inspiring story of women immigrants that are the “new face of U.S. labor.” David Bacon writes that Lucy Wong and Lupe Chavez, from China and El Salvador, have “inherited the legacy of the 1934 General Strike and the rise of the longshoremen.” Wong and Chavez are San Francisco-based labor activists that are giving big hotel chains a run for their money. To “even the odds” between these local workers and the massive hotel corporations who strive to make them pay for their own insurance, protests have evolved in order to be more effective, taking on the shape of civil disobedience. “Without a new contract, the union is prepared to disrupt the normal order of business, just as the longshoremen did on the waterfront 80 years ago.”
And then there’s the story of a young woman named Mimin, who found herself trapped for seven years doing forced labor. At 17, Mimin emigrated from Indonesia to the U.S. thinking she’d “work as a housekeeper for a wealthy family in Los Angeles and send money to her parents back home,” but instead ended up “enslaved in domestic servitude,” as Emily Udell reports for In These Times. She finally escaped, but there are roughly 50,000 people like Mimin trafficked to the U.S. every year, and 27 million more enslaved around the world. This makes the job of uncovering and ending this practice our collective responsibility.
Sometimes it is the artist who explores intractable paradigms in new ways. And sometimes it is simply getting news from a different source, or filtered through an alternative lens. New America Media interviews Luis Alberto Urrea about his novel Into the Beautiful North, which NAM editor Sandip Roy describes as “an immigration story with a difference.” Urrea reminds us of the obvious: To many people, coming to the U.S. is a painful sacrifice. A woman parting from her beloved family to earn enough money to keep them eating does not do so lightly. A learned and respected elder settling for a career as a bowling alley attendant is the result of economic desperation. “You cannot eat beauty,” says a woman in his novel.
Nor can we in good conscience sing anthems about beautiful and spacious skies or fields of harvest if we do not remember how many are in need, and do our utmost to help them.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration and is free to reprint. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Regardless of how sad illegal aliens' stories are, they shouldn't recieve taxpayer-funded healthcare, intended for U.S. (or Canadaian) CITIZENS. Actually, they shouldn't be allowed into the U.S. (or Canada), in the first place. The priorities of governments are to the financial, environmental and public-safety needs of their own citizens.
The Bush Amnesty Bill and the Democrats' support for similar legislation reflects these politicians' conections to the real estate, construction and banking lobbies. These groups need constant population growth, in order to justify the construction of housing and associated infrastructure (roads, schools), with attendant financial products (mortgages, REITs) to finance them. Mass immigration--legal, or otherwise--fills this need for warm bodies. This keeps the real estate bubble endlessly inflated. Employers also enjoy a pool of compliant, low-cost labour, provided by 'work for cheap' immigrants from 3rd World countries.
Other than the needs of the financial and real estate/construction sectors, the effects of mass immigration on Canadian, U.S., British and Australian citizens has been less than beneficial. An example is urban sprawl. In Canada, adding over 250,000 legal immigrants anually (close to 400,000, when illegal and 'temporary' immigration is factored in) has meant the loss of greenspace and agricultural land (and, hence, higher food prices), along with added strain on freshwater supplies. In U.S. border states, the loss of land to immigration-fuelled housing sprawl is even more dire. ASide from concerns about political correctness (most of the newcomers are People of Colour), philanthropic payolla keeps mainstream 'environmental' groups silent. The Sierra Club accepted nearly $100M, from a wealthy patron (David Gelbaum), on the condition that it avoid any discussion of immigration and overpopulation. The David Suzuki Foundation recieves most of its funding from BMO-Financial and CIBC, who have lobbied for nearly doubling immigration.
Finally, the Labour Government in Australia--not beholden to developers, as the Liberals were--is speaking out about the link between mass immigration and urban sprawl. Even the British government has mused about imposing a hard cap on Britain's population. In North America, the environmental movement has to get a spine, throw off the yoke of corporate bribery, and fight for a halt to endless population growth. Part and parcel to that will be a severe curb on immigration.
For years, the pundits have told us that a key reason we're bringing in such large numbers of immigrants is to keep the pension system solvent. With Ruby Dhalla's indroduction of Bill C-428, THAT facade's finally fallen off. This very ill-concieved piece of legislation is nothing short of actuarial armageddon; the reason that Canada's Old Age Security system is 'discriminatory' is that Canada has reciprocal agreements with developed countries (Britain, &c.). The pension system will NOT survive such an influx of claimants. The U.S. public (Medicaid and Medicare) health systems are similarilly taxed by non-citizens' useage, at the expense of low-income and elderly American citizens. Milton Friedman famously observed that people could have either unlimited immigration, or a welfare state, but not both. Most citizens of developed countries, myself included, would prefer the welfare state.
In Canada and the U.S., we can't afford to be endlessly generous to the entire world. The governments of Canada, the U.S., Britain and Australia have to put their own citizens' needs first.
In Canada health care is for Permanent Residents not just Citizens (even if you put it in caps). You started with that crap and went downhill from there.
Blaming immigration for urban sprawl is your them you have been spreading like manure in a pile of threads and blogs with no mention of urban planners and regulation (something a real environmentalist rather than an anti-immigrant wannabe poser would think of).
I have already in another thread you started introduced the facts about your so called Armageddon.
The pension that immigrants would become entitled to is only a tiny amount for the time they have been in Canada-- they would get like everyone else 1/40 of a pension full for each year they have been in Canada-- with a minimum of three years. So a person after three years would get 3/40 of a full pension which is $516 which is $38.70. Also the so called mass immigration of older people is in fact 13,000 people and declining. Your figure of 250,000 is the entire number of migrants not just the parents.
If you were limited to telling the truth your posts would disappear.