¿(¡Viva la immigración!)?

Could wearing a sombrero and bandana (and growing a bushy mustache) be a viable way for Arizonans to protest state law SB1070?

Deportation and immigration

Buried lead: They're not just arresting, but arresting, imprisoning and deporting American citizens as illegal aliens.

Feb. 14, 2008, 12:35AM
Feds admit mistakenly jailing citizens as illegal immigrants

By MARISA TAYLOR
McClatchy-Tribune

WASHINGTON — A top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official acknowledged Wednesday that his agency has mistakenly detained U.S. citizens as illegal immigrants, but he denied that his agency has widespread problems with deporting the wrong people.

Gary Mead, ICE's deputy director of detention and removal operations, testified during a House of Representatives subcommittee hearing that U.S. citizens have been detained on "extremely" rare occasions, but he blamed the mix-ups on conflicting information from the detainees.

Nonetheless, Mead said his agency is reviewing its handling of people who claim to be U.S. citizens "to determine if even greater safeguards can be put in place."

The testimony before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law came after immigration advocates told McClatchy that they'd seen a small but growing number of cases of U.S. citizens who've been mistakenly detained and sometimes deported by ICE. They accuse agents of ignoring valid assertions of citizenship in the rush to deport more illegal immigrants.

Unlike suspects charged in criminal courts, detainees accused of immigration violations don't have a right to an attorney, and three-quarters of them represent themselves.

Last month, Thomas Warziniack, a U.S. citizen who was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, was mistakenly detained for weeks in an Arizona immigration facility and told that he was going to be deported to Russia.

Warziniack, 40, was released after his family, who learned about his predicament from a McClatchy Newspapers reporter, produced his birth certificate.

In another high-profile example, ICE agents in California mistakenly deported Pedro Guzman, a mentally disabled U.S. citizen, to Mexico. Guzman was found months later when he tried to return to the United States.

These are just the cases where they realized they had made a mistake. There are probably dozens of other Americans sent to places who we will never hear of again.

They should stop harassing immigrants and Americans who they suspect of looking like immigrants.

North America has a long and historic tradition of being colonized by immigrants who did not obtain the consent of the former residents. That continues, but could change. Rather than letting millions of people cross the border every year, and then trying to pick them out of a crowd, how about just securing the border first? Homeland Security has absolutely no reason to exist and should be abolished if they cannot at least do that. The "Security" of the "Homeland" against another 20 hijackers is meaningless if there are 2,000,000 illegal border crossings a year. There is no point patching microholes in the side of a bucket if the bucket has no bottom. A reasonable goal might be to cut illegal border crossings 90% a year for five years, to 200,000 in the first year, 20,000 the next, and onwards down to the goal of 20. It should be possible to image every rabbit, coyote, road-runner, and chupacabra crossing the border and distinguish them from the people, who should be restrained without violencia.

One hundred thousand soldiers repatriated from Iraq on the two thousand mile southern border would provide an additional 50 lookouts per mile. The Canadian border is wide open, too.

Use a biometric for legal crossings, not passports. Just show your palm, match that to an identity.

For the people who have already crossed over, it is too late to try to stop them now. (Thanks in part to "conservatives" like Ronald Reagan.) Their status is confused. Some were born in the US to illegals decades ago, or have family members of varying status. If not citizenship, these people will at least have to be offered residency, though on terms that are not as attractive as the legal path. They need to make the legal path run more effectively, too. When I applied for permanent residency in Japan, it took about 3 weeks. I got a postcard and went to get the stamp in my passport. According to some reports, it is much more of a third-world, half-assed, shit-for-brains operation to deal with the authorities in the US. Americans seem to think government is not supposed to work, and do not fund it or demand that it work properly or humanely. It's an embarrassment for Americans.

Once they get control of illegal immigration, the US could begin to debate how much immigration it wants, of what kind of people, from where. Should the United States attempt to stop any slight population decline and aim for zero population growth by admitting immigrants to make up for it, or aim for a certain rate of population growth? Should the country favor illiterate, uneducated, undocumented or criminals from Mexico, or admit educated English-speaking professionals instead, for example? If a country like Bangladesh loses 50% of its land due to global warming, shouldn't the United States accept refugees from its carbon dioxide induced warming? How many millions of people a year does the United States want to take?

El Norte all over again South of the Border

It was refreshing to wake up and read this article by E. J. Dionne, which can also be found here, here or here.

López Obrador has had questions about the results in the state of Tabasco. Messrs. Calderón and López Obrador, please, please make sure that you don't have some close relative in charge of things down there. How would it look if the governor of the state was your own brother? What would people think if the top official in charge of elections was your sibling's partisan ally who made every key decision in your favor?
…
Another thing: Whichever one of you is ahead at any given point, please don't ask that the counting be stopped abruptly. Don't have some high-class lawyer with a name like Jaime A. Panadero III come out and say things like, "I don't believe that the people of Mexico want this national election turned over to lawyers and court contests" -- and then have the very same lawyer direct other lawyers to go to court to stop any further counts.

If either of you did such a thing, wouldn't it look hypocritical? Would it not seem as if all you cared about was obtaining power -- and that you didn't care how you got it? It would spoil the legitimacy of your election.

But, yes, there is an excellent chance that the Mexican election will end up in the courts. So it will be very important that the court rulings have credibility with the Mexican people, especially with those who end up on the losing side. The judges should exercise their power, well, judiciously. They need to make sure that they're not seen as making a partisan call.

Above all, this means not stopping recounts just before a deadline -- and then claiming, after the court-imposed delay, that there was no way to remedy the very problems in the counting that the court itself might point to because the deadline had passed.

It means that the judges should arrive at whatever decision they reach in a way that's consistent with their past views. They should not invent wholly new doctrines, utterly at odds with their previous positions, that happen to favor the candidate closer to their own ideological inclinations.

And, please, let there be no court decision so unprincipled that the judges themselves have to say that their ruling has no application to any future cases, that it "is limited to the present circumstances," because of the "many complexities" involved. That would make the whole court process look fixed, wouldn't it?
My Mexican friends could well object that it is insulting and ludicrous to presume their country is capable of coming up with such a nightmarish scenario. They would argue that no well-functioning democracy would ever settle a contested election in the ways I have just described.

I feel hopeful that Americans may be starting to notice that their own "democratic process" looks bad next to Mexico's, which didn't have the best record in the twentieth century. If this mysterious, new, reality-based way of seeing (known in China as "Seek truth from facts" 实事求是, shí shì qiú shì), currently out of vogue in the American political culture, could take hold in the US again, Americans may also notice that the national medical non-system is one of the worst in the world, the educational system has gone from tops to mediocre, and that around the world, the America of Bush is now more disliked (seen as a negative influence) than China and Russia.
Could be that what goes around comes around, and that the bad karma America imposed on places such as Chile, Iraq, El Salvador, and Mexico is now coming home to roost? The days when the three-letter agencies just killed and imprisoned foreign leaders and overthrew their governments are over. They have now conditioned the American people to accept the erosion of their freedom, leading to a political system that looks more and more like Russia and a social and economic system that resembles the ones we first set up years ago for Chile, Argentina, Colombia or Mexico. It may take a generation or it could be over in ten years, but the American system will decay and decline under the influence of Bushism. I mean, if America has higher levels of political and corporate corruption than Mexico has, our economy will eventually decline. Mexican immigrants may begin to flood back into Mexico the way immigrants who once left Japan, China, and India are now returning to their ancestral homes.