(im)migration

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Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent: Eduardo Galeano

 

Book Description

 

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.

Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.

 

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Source: www.amazon.com

 

Money can move across borders.

 

Raw materials can move across borders.
Manufactured goods can move across borders.

 

People (especially the poor) are highly restricted from moving across borders.

 

People should have the freedom and liberty to move where the resources and jobs are located.

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Voters support a path to legalization for immigrants

Though deeply concerned about the effects of illegal immigration on California, state voters broadly support a path to legalization for the nation’s 12 million unauthorized residents, according to a new poll.

Source: www.latimes.com

 

#NoHumanIsIllegal

 

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CBP: No agents disciplined for deadly force since 2004

Customs and Border Protection’s acting Internal Affairs chief said Friday that he is unaware of any Border Patrol agent or CBP officer being formally disciplined for killing someone through the use of force since at least 2004.

Source: www.azcentral.com

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Obama draws flak over immigration reform delay

Insisting that factors beyond his control had created an untenable political situation, President Obama said Saturday that he would postpone his promised executive action to make drastic changes to the immigration system — a delay that leaves tens of thousands of immigrants open to deportation and millions more in limbo.

Source: www.latimes.com

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Refugees and Dissidents

By Matt Hanson

 

Introduction

In North America, and elsewhere around the world, for example in Mediterranean countries such as Greece and Italy, there is a growing antipathy for migrants. The United States and Canada are not alone in the increasing volume of political distaste for migrants. In the United States in particular, there is an inherent contradiction within this debate, and this crisis of asylum, as concerns the identification of migrants as invaders.

With unabated trends favoring economic globalization, such as the overshadowing precedence of international free trade agreements, wealthy nations have a greater responsibility to receive economic migrants, and equally, forced migrants fleeing life-threatening persecution. To deny this responsibility is to reject the foundations of humanity, and to delegitimize the standard of national boundaries as security zones. Instead, national boundaries fulfill their original purpose, militarized demarcations, where the history of an invasion has simply taken another form.

In other words, the misperception of migrants as invaders exposes the fundamental myth of the modern nation state as a cultural, social, political, or economic distinction. As is most apparent outside of North America and Europe, however within as well, cultural, social, political and economic phenomena observably transcend state boundaries, merging in varying forms transnationally. Similarly, all people, as such, are a part of the transnational social capital that exists in every nation individually, and collectively throughout the globe. The inequalities of the global marketplace are manifest in the story of the modern immigrant.

Immigrant is a very different term than migrant. With its special legal, political, social and cultural ramifications, immigration is a process whereby a foreigner resides permanently in a country other than that of their origin. Immigration also connotes official identification, as recognized by the country wherein one is immigrating. Whereas migration is a primordial concept, immigration entails the officialdoms of international law, and domestic policy.

Anti-immigration is the result of geopolitical insecurity, while deeply rooted in forms of racism steeped in multigenerational, and colonialist inequality.

 

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Source: unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com

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The Second Cooler – documentary on US (im)migration and the free trade agreement

The Second Cooler is a documentary about illegal migration shot primarily in Alabama, Arizona, and northern Mexico. The premise is that Arizona is the new Alabama—the epicenter of an intense struggle for migrant justice. The documentary’s purpose is to bring basic migration issues into focus. Those issues include the impact of free trade agreements on migration, the lack of a legal way for poor Latin Americans to come to the United States, the inherent abuses of the guest worker program, the fact that many migrants are indigenous people, anti-immigrant politics in Alabama, the thousands of migrant deaths at the border, and an escalating ideology of the border.

Source: thesecondcooler.com

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LA Times: Border Patrol sued in fatal shooting of man in Mexico

 

Guillermo Arevalo Pedraza (2nd L) poses with his wife and daughters in an undated photo released by his family in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. REUTERS/Family of Guillermo Arevalo Pedraza/Handout via Reuters

The family of a Mexican man who was shot and killed by U.S. Border Patrol agents two years ago has filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging that the agency sanctioned an unbridled use of deadly force in response to rock throwing.

 

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Source: soboco.org

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U.S. Immigration Before 1965


January 1, 1892, Annie Moore, a teenager from County Cork, Ireland, was the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island. She had made the nearly two-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean in steerage with her two younger brothers. Annie later raised a family on New York City’s Lower East Side.

 

Some of America’s first settlers came in search of freedom to practice their faith. In 1620, a group of roughly 100 people later known as the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in Europe and arrived at present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they established a colony. They were soon followed by a larger group seeking religious freedom, the Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By some estimates, 20,000 Puritans migrated to the region between 1630 and 1640.

A larger share of immigrants came to America seeking economic opportunities. However, because the price of passage was steep, an estimated one-half or more of the white Europeans who made the voyage did so by becoming indentured servants. Although some people voluntarily indentured themselves, others were kidnapped in European cities and forced into servitude in America. Additionally, thousands of English convicts were shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants.

 

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Source: www.history.com

 

This article mentions the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 but fails to mention the Asian Exclusion act of 1924.

 

It also fails to mention that non-Europeans were not allowed to become citizens at many points in U.S. history.

 

People born in India were not allowed to become US citizens till 1946.

 

All Asians were allowed to become citizens in 1952 with the Walter–McCarran Act.

 

If we do not talk about citizenship rights when we talk about immigration, we are missing half of the discussion about dignity, respect and humanity.

 

Today’s social injustice issue is still about who is allowed to immigrate and become a citizen.

 

History shows that humans were allowed to (im)migrate to the U.S. for both religious and economic reasons.

 

Today’s (im)migrants move for reasons of survival (like the Irish did).

And they also move as war refugees, climate refugees, economic refugees and political refugees.

 

Drop the i-Word.

 

No human is illegal.

 

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My life as a colony: a self-portrait in four parts -by Claire Marie O’Brien

 

“It’s funny how much people hate

to see me standing at the Gates,

presuming  I can give expression

to real,  system-wide oppression.

To them I say,” Well you tell me

why nothing here applies to me.

Why every  fundamental right

applies to everyone  in sight

except for those you single out

as people who just do not count.”

 

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Source: electricinthedesert.wordpress.com

 

Check the whole post to get the full impact.

 

It’s haunting and powerful.

 

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Mexican president calls for immigration reform – US News

 

By BRIAN MELLEY, Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Mexico’s president spoke of the need for U.S. immigration reform on a two-day visit to immigrant-friendly California, saying those who reject diversity and inclusion will ultimately be proven wrong.

“We want to be a factor of cohesion, not division, with full respect for the sovereignty of the United States,” President Enrique Pena Nieto said Monday. “This, at the end, is about — and only about — a matter of justice for those who contribute so much to the development of the American society.”

Pena Nieto was welcomed by Gov. Jerry Brown, who played up his immigration credentials in a speech that highlighted the close cultural and historical ties they share across borders.

“It wasn’t very long ago that the governor of California was outlawing driver’s licenses for people who were undocumented from Mexico,” Brown said. “That’s not the law anymore.”

Brown signed a bill into law last year that will enable immigrants to get driver’s licenses next year. He said he got the message after a visit to a Monterey artichoke field where the workers yelled “licencia, licencia.”

During an upbeat speech embracing the ties between Mexico and California, Brown didn’t entirely gloss over a relationship that has, at times, been fraught with tension and he referred to past ethnic problems.

California voters in 1994 passed Proposition 187 that sought to ban immigrants who are in the country illegally from access to social services including health care and education, though it was reversed by the courts.

Hispanics have now become a force to be reckoned with in California. They now make up the largest of any racial or ethnic group in the state, though their voter registration numbers still lag behind whites.

 

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Source: www.usnews.com