Friday, October 31, 2008

Legal Immigrants Next Target of Anti-Immigration Groups

by Tom Barry, TransBorder Project
October 17, 2008

The leading anti-immigration groups don't specially target illegal immigrants. For the restrictionist groups Federation for American Immigration Reform, Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA, the country's 11-12 million illegal immigrants are simply low-hanging fruit. Their long-range goal is to rid the nation of most all immigrants—both illegal and legal.

See complete article at:
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5600

Tom Barry directs the TransBorder Project of the Americas Policy Program at the Center for International Policy. He blogs at http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Talks in Kansas City focus on immigration

by Tony Pecinovsky, People's Weekly World
October 28, 2008

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - "We cannot talk about immigration without talking about racism," said Jane Guskin, co-author of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers, to a packed audience at the Guadeloupe Community Center here October 23.

As part of a nation-wide tour to promote community dialog on immigration issues, Guskin challenged KC area participants to analyze their own experiences and question stereotypes that lead to racist depictions of immigrants. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/13918/

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Stop the Raids in the First 100 Days

Silence on Immigration
by David Bacon, Foreign Policy in Focus
October 23, 2008

The first of the 388 workers arrested in the immigration raid on the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, were deported in mid-October, having spent five months in federal prison. Their crime? Giving a bad Social Security number to the company to get hired. Among them will be a young man who had his eyes covered with duct tape by a supervisor on the line, who then beat him with a meathook. The supervisor is still on the job.

The Postville raid was one of the many recent immigration operations leading to criminal charges and deportations for thousands of people. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff calls this "closing the back door. " Meanwhile, his department seeks to "open the front door" by establishing new guest-worker programs, called "close to slavery" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Something is clearly wrong with the priorities of immigration enforcement. Hungry and desperate workers go to jail and get deported. The government protects employers and seeks to turn a family-based immigration system into a managed labor supply for business. Yet national political campaigns say less and less about it. Immigrant Latino and Asian communities feel increasingly afraid and frustrated. Politicians want their votes, but avoid talking about the rising wave of arrests, imprisonment, and deportations. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5620

Photographer and journalist David Bacon is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Immigration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press).

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Ohioans Believe Illegal Immigrants Should Stay

Conservative media on cable television, talk radio and the Internet fueled opposition to legislation that would allow illegal immigrants to stay in the United States...On the other hand, the liberal media spent little time promoting its position.

By Sheila McLaughlin, The Cincinnati Enquirer
October 25, 2008

Let illegal immigrants stay here.

That's what 56 percent of Ohioans said in a poll conducted this month by the University of Cincinnati Institute for Policy Research -- and people polled in Southwest Ohio topped that figure.

In this corner of the state, 60 percent said they favored a government policy that allowed undocumented immigrants to stay in the country and become U.S. citizens if they met unspecified requirements in a certain timeframe.

That puts Ohioans in sync with the rest of the nation, according to a Gallup Poll last year, said Eric Rademacher, the institute's interim co-director.

Read the full article:
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20081025/NEWS0106/810260302

The Closing of the American Border

Q&A with Edward Alden
Sandip Roy, New America Media

Oct 12, 2008

Editor’s Note: The war on terror has come home to America. But when did the war on terror morph into a war on illegal immigration? Today it is much harder for a terrorist to enter the United States than it used to be, but according to Edward Alden, it's also much harder for everyone else. Edward Alden is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration and Security Since 9/11. Alden was interviewed by New America Media editor Sandip Roy.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the government seemed to put forth a unified stance on the need to combat terror. But you say in your book that there was actually a fierce internal fight between two groups--you call them The Cops versus The Technocrats. Who are they?

Indeed, this fight began the very night of 9/11. Jim Ziegler, who was the head of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) at the time, was strongly opposed to what the Ashcroft Justice Department did after 9/11, which was to use immigration laws aggressively as a counter-terrorism tool, to hold people on immigration violations if they believed they had even the slightest connection to terrorism. [...]

Read the full interview:
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=3172f2965d1a32817bff097afa501763

Friday, October 24, 2008

What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand?

Reason magazine, working with the National Foundation for American Policy, has put together a two-page chart explaining what happens when immigrants try to "wait their turn in line."

Here are three different versions of the chart.

Reason's PDF version:
http://www.nfap.com/pdf/0808reason.pdf

Reason's JPG version:
http://www.reason.com/images/07cf533ddb1d06350cf1ddb5942ef5ad.jpg

The National Foundation for American Policy's PDF version:
http://www.nfap.com/pdf/082308immigrationchart.pdf

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Boston Area Immigration Workshop, Nov. 8

The Politics of Immigration
A workshop on countering the right and developing pro-immigrant analysis

With David Wilson, co-author of The Politics of Immigration, Questions and Answers (Monthly Review Press, 2007; copies will be available for purchase)

Saturday, November 8, 2008
7 pm
The Democracy Center
45 Mt Auburn St, Harvard Sq
Cambridge, MA

Presented by the Boston Radical Education Project
(617) 491-2876; repboston@gmail.com

Have you heard an anti-immigrant argument that you feel is wrong, but need the facts to contest? (For example: "Immigrants are a drain on social services.") Do you have your own fear or concern about the issue? (For example: "Are the lowest-paid US-born workers really hurt by immigration?") Bring your concerns to this upcoming dialogue and we'll work together to develop effective responses using facts, reasoning and personal experiences.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

INB 10/21/08: South Carolina Poultry Plant Raided

On Oct. 12, about 65 people marched more than three miles from the Mills Manufacturing plant in Woodfin, North Carolina, to downtown Asheville to protest an Aug. 12 ICE raid at the parachute manufacturing plant and the impending deportation of the 57 workers arrested there. Speakers blasted what they said was overzealous or selective law enforcement by local sheriffs, particularly Van Duncan in Buncombe and Rick Davis in Henderson.

Immigration News Briefs
Vol. 11, No. 25 - October 21, 2008

1. South Carolina Poultry Plant Raided
2. Immigrant Rights Marches in North Carolina and Beyond
3. Protected Status Renewed for Central Americans, Urged for Haitians

Immigration News Briefs is a weekly supplement to Weekly News Update on the Americas, published by Nicaragua Solidarity Network, 339 Lafayette St, New York, NY 10012; tel 212-674-9499; weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com; http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. INB is also distributed free via email; contact immigrationnewsbriefs@gmail.com to subscribe or unsubscribe. You may reprint or distribute items from INB, but please credit us and tell people how to subscribe. Immigration News Briefs is posted at http://immigrationnewsbriefs.blogspot.com.

*1. SOUTH CAROLINA POULTRY PLANT RAIDED
On Oct. 7, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agents executed a federal criminal search warrant at the House of Raeford's Columbia Farms poultry processing plant in Greenville, South Carolina, arresting 11 workers on criminal charges and 320 workers on administrative immigration charges. [ICE News Release 10/9/08] About 100 ICE agents raided the plant during shift change. ICE officials kept the workers inside the plant for most of the morning as they sought to determine how many were present in the US without permission. [AP 10/7/08; Charlotte Observer 10/8/08] [...]

Read the full INB:
http://immigrationnewsbriefs.blogspot.com/2008/10/inb-102108-south-carolina-poultry-plant.html

Monday, October 20, 2008

Winning the Fight of Our Lives: Immigrant Rights and Prison-IndustrialComplex

By Subhash Kateel, Left Turn
October 1, 2008

If the immigrant rights movement doesn't understand raids, detention, and deportation in the context of the greater prison-industrial complex, and organize accordingly, we will lose the fight of our lives - a fight we can and must win.

During the immigration debates and protests of 2006-2007, a small but significant chorus of organizations - those working with families facing deportation - spoke out strongly against many of the immigration reform legislative proposals. What many in the beltway where calling "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" (CIR) wasn't comprehensive enough to fix the detention and deportation system that had eaten up and spit out almost two million people and destroyed nearly as many families. Instead, the grand bargain for reform was to allow for stricter immigration enforcement in exchange for a normalized status for some undocumented immigrant workers.

In the limited scope of those debates, the primary contention was whether that normalized status would lead to green cards (legalization) or not for those immigrant guest workers. It seemed the folks in the beltway, some dear friends of ours, felt the need to concede the anti-immigrant forces' thirst for more enforcement in order to obtain some semblance of legalization. However, it seemed the survivors of immigration enforcement - families facing deportation and families affected by the deaths and militarization of the border - were being made into sacrificial lambs for an elusive blessing of legalization riddled with unwanted curses.

Our intentions weren't based solely on self-interest. Fighting for justice for our brothers and sisters that died in detention, for our children that had lost parents to deportation, and for our families whose sole income provider suffered the desert terrain alongside the border wasn't a trivial struggle. But like our colleagues backing CIR, we were also fighting for the future of immigrant communities.

Emerging apartheid
At that time, I wrote in Left Turn about the fight of our lives. Back then, my colleagues and I had highlighted to our friends in the immigrant rights movement that we were witnessing the emergence of immigrant apartheid in the US. A system was developing that would systematically criminalize and attack immigrants' lives as people of color and working people. This emerging apartheid would use the criminal justice-, prison-, and deportation systems - and any other system - at its disposal to make lives of immigrants - both legal and undocumented - as hard as possible. What we would see, whether we won reform or not, would be more arrests, more raids, more detentions, and more deportations. In sum, more destruction of our communities.

Many people in the mainstream of the immigrant rights movement thought that we were blowing things out of proportion. Some mocked our characterization of what was happening to immigrants as "apartheid." Some allies had labeled our work against deportation, detention, and the excesses of the criminal justice system as "boutique issues" - sexy, but not as substantive as the fight for legalization. Others were far too enchanted with portraying immigrants as hardworking and law-abiding. They saw nothing wrong with focusing the ire of immigration enforcement on the "bad" immigrants nor saw anything cynical about alluding to rights as something that "good" immigrants deserve.

They sure as hell weren't going to sacrifice a potential win just to benefit the "bad" immigrants, namely - those in the deportation- and criminal justice systems. We would keep insisting, in vain it seemed, that this fight had to be about more than just green cards in an era where green cards were losing their significance. It also had to be about more than the "good" immigrants in an era where the "good" immigrants could easily be recast as "bad."

We were speaking from experience. We had seen how the FBI had taken a young hardworking legal immigrant and pizza deliverer named Anser Mahmood and recast him, first, as a suspected terrorist. When that didn't work, the small financial assistance he gave to immigrant friends was defined as "alien smuggling," making him a criminal alien and mandatorily deportable to Pakistan, despite the pleas from his own upstate New York neighbors and over a dozen members of Congress. We had seen US Army veteran and legal immigrant Warren Joseph's post traumatic stress from the first Gulf War cause him to run afoul of the law and into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center for three years, facing deportation to Trinidad. We had seen post-September 11 raids tear apart the lives of over 1500 working families from South Asia and the Middle East under the guise of the "war on terror."

The anti-immigrant far Right (and not-so-far Right) had no such illusions of a difference between "good" and "bad" immigrants. They talked openly about a "war of attrition" against immigrants. Late night pundits like Pat Buchanan talked candidly and favorably about going after all unwanted immigrants under the guise of going after the "worst." Those of us that had worked with families facing deportation for the past decade understood this strategy.

Movement miscalculation
A major miscalculation of some of the immigrant rights movement was the assessment that the immigration system was attacking only immigrants and to legalization not to be confused with actual legalization - they would be fine. This ignores the fact that the value of a green card had diminished since the passage of 1996 so-called reforms. It also ignores the fact that many of the aforementioned immigrants still lead their lives as low-income immigrants of color.

Many of our friends in the immigrant rights movement simply couldn't see that the forces creating apartheid against immigrants were also attacking the ideas and institutions of immigrants - those that allowed them to rise above subsistence (in some cases flourish) -as much as they where attacking immigrants and their status. In the process immigrants - and the ideas and institutions of their everyday lives - were being criminalized. This criminalization had become far easier in a period marked by "wars" on drugs, "wars" on terror, and other "wars" meant to have an elusive target and a beginning with no end.

Some of us had the blessing of knowing elders that fought for civil rights, and those who carried the struggle beyond civil rights, to the Black liberation movement. Historical reflection impressed something upon us. Just maybe, for all the rhetorical linkages that the immigrant rights movement drew with the Civil Rights movement, we failed to see what happened in the Black community after the peak of the Civil Rights movement.

The victories of integration were followed by an explosion in the prison system and mass incarceration in the Black community. Communities that survived poll tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses to preserve their right to vote were processed through the criminal justice system only to be disenfranchised again. The vibrant businesses and civic associations that endured decades of Jim Crow would be replaced by extreme capital flight and a criminalized informal sector - a criminalized political economy. What the Civil Rights struggle forced the government to give back to Black folks through the narrative of its "best" (Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, etc.) the government would later take by pushing narratives of the Black community at its "worst."

Open eyes
Hindsight is only 20/20 when our eyes are open. The difference between that period and this period is that the clues of what was next for the Black community were not as readily available to our Freedom Fighters of that era. President Nixon's crime strategy, as he articulated behind closed doors, was to direct the criminal justice system primarily at the Black community without publicly saying so. This only became public knowledge after one of Nixon's closest aides' personal experiences with the prison system exposed him to its evils.

By comparison, the blueprint criminalizing immigrants was made readily available to the public. The much-touted and hated Sensenbrenner-King bill of 2005-2006, which passed the House of Representatives, left little encrypted in its desire for wholesale criminalization of immigrant communities. Even earlier, plans like the quickly-recanted "PATRIOT Act II," crafted in 2002 by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, proposed to criminalize the very way immigrants made their livings and lived their lives.

During the Civil Rights movement, there was a whole chorus of Freedom Fighters that cried that the struggle couldn't just be about integration. The expansion of the prison-industrial complex in the Black community and its subsequent "wars" (on drugs, for example) was that era's tragic "We told you so." In 2006, many of us were screaming, "This can't just be about green cards!" The expansion of ICE raids was our tragic "We told you so."

On May 12, 2008, ICE agents arrested 389 workers during a raid at the Agriprocessors Inc meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa. Within weeks, nearly 300 mostly-Latino workers were criminally charged by federal prosecutors with crimes ranging from identity theft to illegal entry. Where a typical ICE raid would result in mostly administrative immigration charges, these workers were railroaded through federal criminal court receiving up to six month sentences in federal prison. In dramatic fashion, ICE instantly made this group of immigrant workers criminal aliens - the "bad" immigrants.

We felt no satisfaction when government tactics confirmed our worst fears. No one wants to be right or prophetic when predicting the destruction of our communities. However, we were taken by surprise by the response from the previously conservative mainstream of our movement. People that would have never been open to understanding the injustices of the criminal justice system and the deportation process saw clearly the need to tackle these systems with a newfound vigor. Over and over again, we would see new voices in immigrant communities come out and say, "Let us fight for legalization, but let us fight for more than legalization." Organizers and activists that have rarely spoken publicly about a family member's incarceration or deportation are coming forward. Old adversaries are talking about strategies to tackle the deportation system.

Movement blueprint
Predicting the emergence of immigrant apartheid is far easier than identifying how a movement can defeat it. But individuals and organizers around the country are developing the blueprint for how we may begin to win.

1) We must make this bigger than green cards. We are fighting for the future of our communities. We cannot act like the path to legalization is a path flowing with milk and honey. It is a necessary step in a path towards a greater vision of social justice.

2) We must focus on building power in immigrant communities. Organizers such as Juan Pablo Chávez of the Florida Immigrant Coalition have instructed us at great length on the need to organize rather than mobilize. We cannot be a movement of mobilizations and talking heads. We must build real leaders in real communities to bring about real change.

3) We must organize in immigrant communities most directly impacted. We must stop talking about "good" and "bad" immigrants and build with those most affected. This is the only way to build a movement with more depth. Families that have survived the prison-industrial complex are not sob stories and charity cases; they are individuals that have survived one of the most sophisticated systems this society has for marginalizing someone. Their knowledge and determination makes our movement stronger. New organizations such as Deported Diaspora in Boston, new organizers such as Luisanna Santibanez in Austin, Texas, and older yet formidable organizations such as Homies Unidos in Los Angeles, and Families For Freedom in New York continue to dedicate their time to building in the most impacted communities. More efforts like this have to be incubated and supported.

4) We must build the capacity of grassroots organizations to create the solutions to their own problems. Policies in the beltway must be grounded in the wisdom and intellect of communities on the ground. But that can only happen when immigrant communities develop the faith and the capacity to create those solutions. Otherwise, solutions in the beltway will be made for immigrants, not by immigrants.

5) We must identify the ideas and institutions in immigrant communities that we need to protect, and protect them vigorously. The things that enable a detainee to represent himself and win his freedom, or enable an immigrant family to survive the desert and support family on two continents are the same things that will enable us to build real alternatives to the world we live in today. When we forsake what our communities have already built, we forsake our real power.

6) We must confront the Department of Homeland Security more directly. From Hurricane Katrina, to the ICE raids, to corrupt agents along the border, the Department of Homeland Security has survived numerous investigations and audits only see its budget increase even more. If we don't find more creative and strategic ways to confront ICE, we will see even more destruction of our communities and have no one else to blame.

Recently, I spoke with a family friend, a young Caribbean woman whose husband was detained by ICE. Nearly everyone had told her that her husband would be deported. Despite this, through her persistence, he was released a month after being detained. On the way home from picking him up she told me "I said my prayers and knew if I fought hard enough, I would see us together again." With that spirit, I know that if we fight smart and fight hard, our communities, our families, and our loved ones will win this fight.

Subhash Kateel is the co-founder and former co-director of Families For Freedom in New York. He is currently a Soros Justice Fellow working with families facing deportation through the Florida Immigrant Coalition. He lives in Miami, but misses his friends and family in Brooklyn and Michigan.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

The Profit of Detention

Private $21 Million Facility Would Speed Process, Investor Says

By Josh White and Nick Miroff, Washington Post

October 5, 2008

FARMVILLE, Va. -- A clearing in the woods between this small town's water treatment plant and a metal salvage yard soon will be transformed into what could become the largest immigration detention facility in the mid-Atlantic region, a $21 million project fueled by the aggressive policies some Virginia localities have adopted toward identifying illegal immigrants and handing them over to the federal government.

The 1,040-bed facility will be unique not only because it will dwarf many of Virginia's jails but also because it is a private venture aimed at capitalizing on the massive influx of detainees into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement system over the past year. A small group of Richmond investors looks to reap millions of dollars in profit by building what has been described as the "mid-Atlantic hub" for ICE operations in a town just three hours south of the nation's capital. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/04/AR2008100402434.html

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Death on Terminal Island

Over four years, 74 people have died while being held by immigration officials. Victoria Arellano was one.

By Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles Magazine
September 2008

Strangely nearly everyone agrees that Victoria Arellano seemed happy. She was locked up on Terminal Island, a place as somber as its name, but her fellow inmates remember her almost as a source of light. She was "muy alegre," says Oscar Santander, who goes by Diana, and who was incarcerated with Arellano at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. Eugene Peba, who was also in custody there, describes her as "very jovial." Walter Ayala became her closest friend. She was "muy contenta," he says, "muy feliz," or at least she appeared to be. "This was a very jolly person," says Clement Lukyamuzi. It makes Edward Bush throw his hands in the air. "How happy can you be over there? I cried all the time!" [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.lamag.com/featuredarticle.aspx?id=9366

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Shame on Us: The U.S. War on Unarmed Working Mothers

By Bill Quigley, CounterPunch
September 26, 2008

Is this what our nation has come to? War against unarmed working mothers? Have we no shame?

Dozens of petite young mothers gathered this week in the parking lot outside the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Mississippi. Each wore a long dress or pants to hide their electronic ankle bracelets. Lift up a pants leg and you can see the black plastic band and monitor which is the size of a pack of cigarettes. Most wore sandals. Several were obviously pregnant.

From the outside the building looked like any office park. But a blue Homeland Security flag waved right next to the red white and blue out in front. Inside, the mothers were being interviewed and readied for deportation. The crime these mothers are charged with? Not guns, not drugs, not spying. Working to put food on the table for their families and not being citizens of the U.S. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.counterpunch.org/quigley09262008.html

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

NYC Immigration Dialogue on Oct. 26

A dialogue on immigration with David Wilson, co-author of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers

Sunday, October 26, 2008
3 pm
At the AJ Muste Memorial Institute
339 Lafayette Street, buzzer #11
New York, NY

(northeast corner with Bleecker Street, take the 6 train to Bleecker St or the D/F to Broadway-Lafayette).

Sponsored by the Socialist Party-USA (NYC)
Free and open to the public.
For more information: 718-869-2279, spnyc@spnyc.org or http://www.spnyc.org

Have you heard an anti-immigrant argument that you feel is wrong, but need the facts to contest? (For example: "Immigrants are a drain on social services.") Do you have your own fear or concern about the issue? (For example: "Are the lowest-paid US-born workers really hurt by immigration?") Bring your concerns to this upcoming dialogue and we'll work together to develop effective responses using facts, reasoning and personal experiences.

Kansas City Area Events Oct. 22-23 with Jane Guskin

The Politics of Immigration co-author Jane Guskin will be in the Kansas City area Oct. 22-23, 2008 for the following events:

The University of Kansas Latino/a Studies Minor presents:
A Panel Discussion with author Jane Guskin on Latinos, Immigration, Politics, and Legislation

Wednesday Oct. 22, 2008
5:30 pm - 7 pm
Big 12 Room, Kansas Union 5th floor

The University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS 66045

As we approach the 2008 presidential elections, media attention is on the potential swing vote represented by Latino/a voters and on the possible impact that the immigration issue could have on the national elections. Join us for a panel discussion with guest speaker, author Jane Guskin, addressing "Immigration Dialogue: A Strategy for Confronting Anti-Immigrant Myths and Misconceptions."

The panel will also feature KU experts on immigration policy, politics, and legislation: Christina Bejarano on "Insights into Latino/a Political Behavior in the United States"; Tanya Golash-Boza on "The Immigration Industrial Complex: The Connection between theProfit Potential and Immigration Policies Destined to Fail"; and Gary Reich on "One Nation, Fifty Immigration Policies? The New State Activism in Immigration Policy." Questions and discussion will follow panel presentation.

For further information contact: Marta Caminero-Santangelo, KU Department of English, (785) 843-2394

* * *

A dialogue on immigration with Jane Guskin,co-author of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers

Thursday, October 23, 2008
7 pm
Guadalupe Center, Inc.
1015 Avenida Cesar E. Chavez
Kansas City, MO

Sponsored by The Cross Border Network, The American Immigration Lawyers Association, The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas & Western Missouri, MEChA-UMKC, El Centro, Missouri Immigrant & Refugee Advocates, Immigrant Justice Advocacy Movement

Free and open to the public.
For more information: 816-835-4745, info@crossbordernetwork.org

Have you heard an anti-immigrant argument that you feel is wrong, but need the facts to contest? (For example: "Immigrants are a drain on social services.") Do you have your own fear or concern about the issue? (For example: "Are the lowest-paid US-born workers really hurt by immigration?") Bring your concerns to this upcoming dialogue and we'll work together to develop effective responses using facts, reasoning and personal experiences.

Westport, CT, Oct. 12 : Of Mice, Men & Immigration

Westport Country Playhouse presents:

Sunday Symposium on "Past and Present Views of Immigration"
with Victoria A. Donoghue, immigration lawyer; Margaret (Maggie) Seligman, Steinbeck expert; and David Wilson, co-author of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers

The symposium follows a matinee performance of John Steinbeck's "Of Mice & Men"
Sunday, October 12, 2008
3 pm
Westport Country Playhouse
25 Powers CourtWestport, CT

Steinbeck's 1937 classic treats the plight of migrant workers during the Depression, and the symposium will discuss similarities to the situation of immigrant workers today. The Westport Country Playhouse's production runs from October 7 to November 1. It is dedicated to the memory of Paul Newman, a longtime Westport resident and supporter of the playhouse. He had intended to direct the production but withdrew last spring because of his health problems.

The symposium is free and open to the public. Tickets for the performance range from $30 to $55 and can be purchased by calling 203-227-4177 or going to http://purchase.tickets.com/buy/TicketPurchase?organ_val=22252&schedule=list

For more information go to:
http://www.westportplayhouse.org/
See also:
http://www.stamfordplus.com/stm/information/nws1/publish/Entertainment_12/Symposium-on-Immigration-enhances-Of-Mice-and-Men-at-Westport-Country-Playhouse3572.shtml

Monday, October 6, 2008

INB 9/5/08: Another Construction Raid in Hawai'i; More "Fugitive" Raids

A joint program of the 6,000-member Hawaii Carpenters Union, Local 745, and its 220 signatory contractors across the state has been pushing for increased enforcement and recently launched an advertising campaign on the subject of unauthorized immigrant labor.

Immigration News Briefs
Vol. 11, No. 24 - October 5, 2008

1. Another Construction Raid in Hawai'i
2. Hawai'i: Workers Released Under Plea Bargain
3. Raid at Louisiana Cement Plant?
4. Texas Donut Company Pleads Guilty
5. More "Fugitive" Raids: CA, PA, DE, NJ, NY, FL, OK

Immigration News Briefs is a weekly supplement to Weekly News Update on the Americas, published by Nicaragua Solidarity Network, 339 Lafayette St, New York, NY 10012; tel 212-674-9499; weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com; http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. INB is also distributed free via email; contact immigrationnewsbriefs@gmail.com to subscribe or unsubscribe. You may reprint or distribute items from INB, but please credit us and tell people how to subscribe. Immigration News Briefs is posted at http://immigrationnewsbriefs.blogspot.com.

*1. ANOTHER CONSTRUCTION RAID IN HAWAI'I
On Sept. 22, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested 21 workers at the Honua Kai construction site in Kaanapali, on the island of Maui in Hawai'i. Twelve of the workers were from Mexico, eight were from Brazil and one was from Slovakia. All were placed in deportation proceedings. The Maui Police Department assisted in the raid.

ICE coordinated the arrests with Ledcor Construction, the general contractor for the Honua Kai project. According to ICE, all 21 workers arrested in the raid worked for Global Stone Inc., a subcontractor based in Orem, Utah. [...]

Read the full INB:
http://immigrationnewsbriefs.blogspot.com/2008/10/inb-9508-another-construction-raid-in.html

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Border Wall: A Foundation of Lawlessness

It would seem that DHS has its own wall to overcome before it can start building one in Brownsville. Of course, these days anything can happen. But given these new hurdles, it seems the border wall issue will be left for the next president to resolve.

by Melissa del Bosque, Texas Observer
September 26th, 2008

Even with Congress embroiled in the country's financial meltdown this week, the Department of Homeland Security managed to get its $400 million to keep building the border wall.

This week, the department also awarded three contractors $37 million in contracts to build border fence in Cameron County. The three companies chosen were the Texas-based Jaco Construction, Colorado-based MCC Construction and the Omaha-based Kiewit Corp. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.texasobserver.org/blog/index.php/2008/09/26/a-foundation-of-lawlessness/