This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
The Senate bill divides illegal immigrants into three groups. Those who arrived after April 1, 2001 could stay permanently if they pass background checks and pay back taxes and a $2,000 fine (no easy task for them); worked at least three of the past five years; work another six years and get in the queue behind other applicants already in it. Immigrants who arrived between April 1, 2001 and January, 2004 would have to return to a US port of entry and re-enter the country legally with a temporary work permit. They would also have to pass background checks and pay back taxes. Finally, illegals who arrived after January, 2004 would be required to leave the country. They could only return on temporary work permits.Any immigration bill, if passed, will create an overwhelming burden of documentation and verification on millions of immigrants as well as the federal bureaucracy and employers. Immigrants going through the process would be forced to give up their right to privacy protection, asylum and due process. If an Employment Verification System is part of a final resolution, they would also have to get a federal agency's permission to work. In addition, it would require them to learn English and would subject them to overwhelming bureacratic red tape that under the best of conditions likely would be rife with errors and delays that would be nightmarish to resolve. And to boot it would create an easily accessed database that would make all those in it easy pickings for identity theives.
Employers under the Senate plan would be required to verify that their new workers are in the country legally. They now only need to ask for worker documents showing those they hire are allowed to be here. The plan envisions a tamper-proof means of ID, such as a driver's license with a picture, a fingerprint or an iris scan. If that provision becomes law, it's step one on the road to a national identity card for everyone, possibly to include an embedded chip so Homeland Security, the NSA and other snoop agencies could keep tabs on all our moves and whereabouts. "Big Brother" is alive and well and "in our face."
A COMPARISON OF CURRENT PROPOSED IMMIGRATION LEGISLATION TO HITLER'S NUREMBERG RACE LAWS
What's on the table being debated in the Congress is not as extreme as Hitler's infamous Nuremberg Race Laws, but there are some ominous comparisons. Early on in Nazi Germany Hitler wanted to assert the superiority of the "Aryan race." He hoped to create a Master Race of pure blue-eyed, blond Aryan Caucausian Nordic types, and even though the notion of Aryan has no racial meaning he inferred that it did in what he preached and the laws he had enacted. The chosen ones were the Herrenvolk and all others were called Untermenschen or subhumans. In the US today Causausian Judeo-Christians are our Herrenvolk and all others are the Untermenschen, especially people of color and Muslims.
We don't say that openly, write our laws with overtly denigrating or restrictive racist language in them or practice a policy of extermination today to create a "racially" pure society. But we did just that for 300 years to our native population and in the process slaughtered about 18 million of them as we built the nation we now have. Hitler, in fact, used what we did as a model for his own plan to exterminate the Jews and other undesirables he wanted eliminated.
We also used black Africans as slaves over the same period we eliminated our native population and then after freeing them held them in the bondage of Jim Crow laws and racist attitudes that exist to this day despite the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. We never accepted black people or any others of color as co-equals even though we piously say we do and enacted laws that codify it.
The current immigration legislation now being debated is only the latest chapter in white America's attempt to put its oppressive boot on the neck of people of color we see as inferior or now label "terrorists." And we created a new public enemy number one after 9/11, Muslims, and have persecuted them with a vengeance. Just like the saying that "history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes", attributed to Mark Twain, what the US has practiced in recent years is not like Nazi Germany at its worst, but there's similarity enough to be very disturbing and we're heading in the wrong direction.
Hitler, too, began slowly and moderately after being named German Chancellor in January, 1933 (about one month before Franklin Roosevelt became our 32nd President). He needed time to consolidate power and at first didn't want to scare the voters before they lost their franchise or moderate politicians before they no longer had any say. What began modestly gradually became more extreme and isn't too dissimilar to what's happening here now. Bill Clinton's signing into law the 1996 immigration reform act (IIRAIRA) and anti-terrorism act (AEDPA) discussed earlier can be seen as the first shot across the bow in the current war against immigrants. Then after 9/11 the gloves came off, and it was off to the races with the infamous Patriot Act, mass witch-hunt roundups of those labeled potential terrorists and now an extreme and hostile attempted crackdown on those immigrant groups we've targeted - those of color, especially Latinos and Muslims. What's next? Unless the current mass public protest uproar continues, gets stronger and makes the lawmakers nervous enough to believe we really mean business and won't stand for this, you can bet it will only get worse until we're all targeted and become potential victims. That's about how Hitler did it, and we seem headed in the same dangerous direction. Good Germans back then didn't complain as long as it happened to others until one day many discovered it could happen to them too. By then it was too late. That's how tyranny works.
MASS OUTRAGE IN THE STREETS NATIONWIDE IN PROTEST - A NEW CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE
In recent weeks millions of people have gone to the streets in cities nationwide to protest en masse against the current immigration legislation in the Congress. These protests have the potential to spread and grow enough to become the new civil rights struggle of our time. Hostile and denigrating legislation in the Congress has lit the fuse, and all the immigrant rights movement may need to combat it is a few Martin Luther King type figures to lead the effort for real justice against a government intent on denying it to them.
The protests are continuing, and at least 60 cities are scheduling more events and demonstrations that include candlelight vigils in Los Angeles, a mass rally at the Washington monument and a "day without Hispanics" in Telluride, CO intended as a work stoppage. In addition, immigration rights activists are planning a national action, student walkout and boycott they call The Great American Boycott of 2006 on May 1 of no work, no school, no shopping and a demand for amnesty and full and equal rights for all working people. Adding overall impact to these mass protests is the presence of Hispanics from Mexico and almost every Central and South American country including Venezuela whose twice democratically elected President, Hugo Chavez, is also a target of US hostility and possible future illegal aggression to oust him. But other immigrant ethnic groups are well represented as well - especially large numbers from the Korean and Chinese communities.
Joshua Hoyt, Executive Director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, a 120-member coalition of organizations, said: "There has never been this kind of mobilization in the immigrant community ever. They have kicked the sleeping giant. It's the beginning of a massive immigrant civil rights struggle." And it's gone beyond just the rights of legal and illegal immigrants to include working people of all races who've seen their jobs exported, unions weakened or destroyed, wages stagnated and essential benefits reduced, lost or never gotten. It's seen permanent high-paying jobs replaced by temporary ones at much lower pay and often no benefits. It's seen the oppressive power of big corporations aided by their allies in government wreak havoc over ordinary working people including legal immigrants and the undocumented in a vicious downward cycle of exploitation and repression. The voices in the streets are saying "no mas/no more." I make no bones where I stand - four-square with all those in the streets, and I was born here and am one of the privileged. That could never have happened if my ancestors had been denied entry or had been deported after they arrived.
Look at the impressive numbers in cities around the country. In my city of Chicago alone, from 300,000 - 500,000 protested downtown near where I live in the largest ever protest in the city's history for any reason. In Los Angeles it was the same thing with somewhere between 1 - 1.5 million in the streets, again historic. In New York, tens of thousands marched across the Brooklyn Bridge carrying the flags of their native countries. And those in the streets included more than immigrants - the unions brought out their members, there were young people and students who walked out of class in defiance of school authorities to join in (40,000 alone in Los Angeles). It's hard to tell where this will lead or what effect it will have, but never underestimate the power of organized people. When enough of them speak out, politicians listen, especially when those people are voters or in the case of young people when they have parents who are. Famed Chicago community organizer Sol Linowitz understood it when he once said "the way to beat organized money is with organized people." Social activist Arundhati Roy also understands and she's said "we are many and they are few." And I suggest we all together do a good imitation of Howard Beale, the news anchor from the 1976 movie Network, who one day got fed up yelled out "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore." Any Howards out there? Come on, let me hear you. I start you off and say what I said before - I'm past made as hell, I won't take it anymore, and I intend to fight back to save my civil liberties and the republic and to help the disadvantaged and oppressed achieve the justice they deserve. But I can't do it alone. I need a lot of you with me.
TODAY'S WAR ON IMMIGRANTS AND "TERRORISTS" WILL BE TOMORROW'S WAR AGAINST US ALL - IT'S ALREADY BEGUN
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
