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Immigration
March In LA
 I
had a beautiful May Day in Los Angeles today, marching with tens
of thousands of people down Wilshire Blvd. To look behind and
in front of where I walked and see a sea of people marching with
smiles on their faces, shouting celebratory and confident chants,
just made me feel so inspired. There is definitely a change in
the wind. People are getting wise to the plight and fed up with
our government’s hubris and unaccountability. We have exploited
Mexico for what we need for too long, importing both people and
raw materials at our whim. And now our government is suddenly
freaking out because the Mexican immigrant population wants a
voice. We are seeing the result of our own globalization and greed.
Crossing
the border illegally, well that rings a bell. I guess it was legal
for the first Europeans to come here and take whatever they wanted
from the land. Our racism is inexcusable. Yeah, it’s complicated
at this point, but we owe it to ourselves and our own genocidal
legacy, to solve these issues in a way that shows some respect
for life.
 The
Nation had a good editorial in the April 24th issue. I took a
couple of quotes that I liked. My only exception to the first
one is the term "low skilled workers". To me it’s
sort of an imperialist, classicist way of seeing things, other
than that I feel like these quotes point out a couple of important
axis points of this issue.
"The
competitive dynamic between low skilled American–born workers
and undocumented ones is a difficult issue, there’s no point
in denying it. But it’s not the impossible conundrum many
commentators have suggested. The response is clear:
Raise the floor-increase the minimum wage, enforce and reform
labor laws, address the healthcare crisis, crack down on employers
who exploit immigrant workers, grant undocumented workers civil
rights and ultimately citizenship rather than second-class "guest
worker" status. These measures would improve the lives of
workers across the board. In other words, immigration reform must
be linked to labor-market reform."
 "Indeed,
in the current debate we should be discussing not only how to
treat people when they get to the border but what makes them come-growing
inequality between North and South, the need to escape poverty
and the hope that success will make it possible to send money
home. There’s no way to devise an effective border policy
if we fail to address the root causes of migration."
(The Nation, April 24th, 2006)
-AR
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