Wednesday, March 31, 2010

ICE officials set quotas to deport more illegal immigrants

By Spencer S. Hsu and Andrew Becker, Washington Post
March 27, 2010

Seeking to reverse a steep drop in deportations, U.S. immigration authorities have set controversial new quotas for agents. At the same time, officials have stepped back from an Obama administration commitment to focus enforcement efforts primarily on illegal immigrants who are dangerous or have violent criminal backgrounds.

The moves, outlined in internal documents and a recent e-mail by a senior U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official to field directors nationwide, differ from pledges by ICE chief John T. Morton and his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, to focus enforcement on the most dangerous illegal immigrants. That approach represented a break from the mass factory raids and neighborhood sweeps the Bush administration used to drive up arrests. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2010/03/27/ST2010032700037.html

Read the ICE memos (PDF):
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/ICEdocument032710.pdf?sid=ST2010032700037

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Immigration Reform: We Need a Better Alternative

by David Bacon, truthout
March 22, 2010

Oakland, California - Sens. Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham announced Thursday their plan for immigration reform. Unfortunately, it is a retread, recycling the same bad ideas that led to the defeat of reform efforts over the last five years. In some ways, their proposal is even worse.

Schumer and Graham dramatize the lack of new ideas among Washington power brokers. Real immigration reform requires a real alternative. We need a different framework that embodies the goals of immigrants and working people, not the political calculations of a reluctant Congress. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.truthout.org/we-need-a-better-alternative57871

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Immigration Update: The Fall of the Great Wall of Boeing

Instead of enforcing laws that have wasted billions of our dollars, caused thousands of deaths, and contributed significantly to the stagnation of our wages over the past 30 years, why not try enforcing laws that actually help us?

by David L. Wilson, MRZine
March 23, 2010

On March 16, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that she was cutting millions of dollars from SBInet, a high-tech "virtual fence" that Boeing Co. has been developing for use along the U.S. border with Mexico. Her announcement came just two days before the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) was scheduled to issue a report on the possibility that this electronic monitoring system "will ultimately not perform as expected and will take longer and cost more than necessary to implement."

SBInet is part of the Secure Border Initiative (SBI), a project the Homeland Security Department launched in November 2005 "to secure America's borders and reduce illegal migration." [...]

Read the full article:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/wilson230310.html

Friday, March 5, 2010

"Rebuilding Haiti" -- the Sweatshop Hoax

When the professors and politicians say they will help Haitian workers by giving them jobs, what they really mean is that they plan to take the jobs away from Dominican, Mexican, and Central American workers -- and pay the Haitians even less for doing the same work.

by David L. Wilson, MRZine
March 4, 2010


Within days of a January 12 earthquake that devastated much of southern Haiti, the New York Times was using the disaster to promote a United Nations plan for drastically expanding the country's garment assembly industry, which employs low-paid workers to stitch apparel for duty-free export, mainly to the U.S. market. This, according to several opinion pieces in the Times, is the way to rebuild Haiti.

The outlines of the plan were drawn up a year earlier, in January 2009, by Oxford economist Paul Collier, but the leading proponents of development through sweatshops have been liberal Democrats in the United States. [...]

Read the full article:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/wilson040310.html