This is another political cartoon I like. Enjoy. From the US News and World Report.
This is from FarkTV. I think it is hilarious. Have a good laugh.
I found this via Citizen Orange (belonging to Signs of the Times), this picture, as Kyledeb said, is the world where the antis would love to live in. This is not how its going to go down though, or I least I hope not. I think the world is moving to a more progressive side, slowly but surely, we will get there and this picture will not come to pass.
Well, this is not about immigration but I’m going to blog about it anyways. It is kind of old too but I’m glad that some people do have b***s. The past 4th of July, the man known as Jesse Helms died. As far as I’ve been told and now read, he was one the most racist and homophobic individuals to ever wield power in this country. Seriously, to the people of NC, what the hell where you thinking in electing this guy? So much hate, destruction, it’s ridiculous and embarrassing. You people should be ashamed. Here are some of the quotes from the illustrious man himself.
“The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian.”
– 1995
“The University of Negroes and Communists”
– Reference to the University of North Carolina devised by Mr. Helms when he worked for Willis Smith’s 1950 U.S. Senate campaign.
“Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade-school classes that teach our children that CANNIBALISM, WIFE-SWAPPING and MURDER of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior.”
– Fund raising mailer, 1996
“All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction.”
– After Mexicans protested his visit in 1986
“Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches.”
– 1995 radio broadcast
“She’s a damn lesbian. I am not going to put a lesbian in a position like that. If you want to call me a bigot, fine.”
– Explaining why he was opposing the appointment of a woman for a cabinet post.
“They should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to marry a Negro.”
– In response to Duke University students holding a vigil after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, 1968
Anyways, back to the point. I read this article over at Alternet and decided to share it here. So, the governor of NC, Gov. Easley decided that all flags should fly half-staff in order to honor the memory of their dead ex-senator. One man said no. It was L.F. Eason, a 29-year veteran of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. This is what he had to say about his choice.
“This is in no way a political decision. I simply do not feel it is appropriate to honor a person whose epitaph of government service was to have voted against or blocked every civil rights issue that came before the US Congress. His doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice cost North Carolina and our Nation much that we may never regain.”
All I can say is bravo good man, bravo. The man had to retire early from his post because of his decision Now, I say honor goes to the men who earned it. In my opinion, Jesse Helms didn’t earn any honor.
I hope everyone enjoys their time off. I’ve never really celebrated this holiday actually. Not because I’m anti-American though. Mainly because I can’t get out of the house, I’ve never even seen the fireworks in town. Maybe for another year. Anyways, lets stop talking about my crappy life and just, I hope everyone enjoys their day and all!
MG
Oh, how I hear that phrase all the time in forums, comment sections in online papers, editorials, letters to the editor and blogs. The law is the law and it should be followed. I agree, not following the law leads to anarchy and no one wants that. Now though, I believe that people should follow laws that make sense. For instance, it is wrong to commit murder or rape someone. Laws against those actions are laws everyone can agree with.
Now, immigration laws, that’s different because we live with a broken system. How is it broken? Broken enough that we have people dying at the borders and millions of people like me, living in the fringes, in the shadows. The antis think it is just easy to follow the law, but they’ve never done it, and well, they would never have to. Immigration is a mess.
But it really bothers me is the antis’s stand on the law. The thing the law is infallible. The should be followed to the letter. Well, sorry, the world doesn’t work like that, and it never actually has. We are talking about a country that was founded on the breaking of British law, which was unfair. Unfair, curious word isn’t it? Unfair is what immigration laws are now, making people risk their lives for something that America does want, the labor.
The law has never been followed to the letter, and some laws shouldn’t, as history shows us.
British law was unfair to the American colonies, America gained its independence and broke away from the motherland, breaking the law.
During the slavery era, some enlightened people took part in the Underground Railroad, breaking the law in an effort to help their fellow men. No one looks back on them as law breakers.
During the Civil Rights movement, countless laws were broken in order to bring about justice to African Americans. Once again, the law was broken.
Americans committed genocide against original population of Native Americans, they were just following the laws and their ‘rights’.
During the time of Nazi Germany, the laws were followed and it gave way to the extermination of 6 million Jews. That is an example of the law being wrong, because everything that happened in that country was legally correct but morally wrong.
I’m sure everyone who has ever driven a car has broken the law once. Everyone who has been young has broken the law or curfew once.
No one is without sin when it comes to obeying the law. And not all laws are just. Take a look at the following quote by Howard Zinn.
“Historically, the most terrible things- war, genocide, slavery- have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.”
So, yes, the law is the law, but the law is not always right. And you have never followed the law to the letter. This is not a call for anarchy, no, but for forgiveness for something that immigrants didn’t want to do but were force to, by a broken immigration system and unjust laws.
I couldn’t say it better myself, from the NY Times, the following editorial.
Someday, the country will recognize the true cost of its war on illegal immigration. We don’t mean dollars, though those are being squandered by the billions. The true cost is to the national identity: the sense of who we are and what we value. It will hit us once the enforcement fever breaks, when we look at what has been done and no longer recognize the country that did it.
A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully. The evidence is all around that something pragmatic and welcoming at the American core has been eclipsed, or is slipping away.
An escalating campaign of raids in homes and workplaces has spread indiscriminate terror among millions of people who pose no threat. After the largest raid ever last month — at a meatpacking plant in Iowa — hundreds were swiftly force-fed through the legal system and sent to prison. Civil-rights lawyers complained, futilely, that workers had been steamrolled into giving up their rights, treated more as a presumptive criminal gang than as potentially exploited workers who deserved a fair hearing. The company that harnessed their desperation, like so many others, has faced no charges.
Immigrants in detention languish without lawyers and decent medical care even when they are mortally ill. Lawmakers are struggling to impose standards and oversight on a system deficient in both. Counties and towns with spare jail cells are lining up for federal contracts as prosecutions fill the system to bursting. Unbothered by the sight of blameless children in prison scrubs, the government plans to build up to three new family detention centers. Police all over are checking papers, empowered by politicians itching to enlist in the federal crusade.
This is not about forcing people to go home and come back the right way. Ellis Island is closed. Legal paths are clogged or do not exist. Some backlogs are so long that they are measured in decades or generations. A bill to fix the system died a year ago this month. The current strategy, dreamed up by restrictionists and embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, is to force millions into fear and poverty.
There are few national figures standing firm against restrictionism. Senator Edward Kennedy has bravely done so for four decades, but his Senate colleagues who are running for president seem by comparison to be in hiding. John McCain supported sensible reform, but whenever he mentions it, his party starts braying and he leaves the room. Hillary Rodham Clinton has lost her voice on this issue more than once. Barack Obama, gliding above the ugliness, might someday test his vision of a new politics against restrictionist hatred, but he has not yet done so. The American public’s moderation on immigration reform, confirmed in poll after poll, begs the candidates to confront the issue with courage and a plan. But they have been vague and discreet when they should be forceful and unflinching.
The restrictionist message is brutally simple — that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever Them and never Us, subject to whatever abusive regimes the powers of the moment may devise.
Every time this country has singled out a group of newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the shame has echoed through history. Think of the Chinese and Irish, Catholics and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Children someday will study the Great Immigration Panic of the early 2000s, which harmed countless lives, wasted billions of dollars and mocked the nation’s most deeply held values.
And more quotes, because I like them. Martin Luther King Jr. More to come…
For those who are apathetic.
We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” This is very hard to do, especially for those who are like me.
I like this quote. I believe it to be true.
“It’s as if we expect border control agents to do what a century of communism could not: defeat the natural market forces of supply and demand… and defeat the natural human desire for freedom and opportunity. You might as well as sit in your beach chair and tell the tide not to come in.” - Michael Bloomberg
This quote is for those who are apathetic. I say get up and stand for what you believe in. If I can do it despite all the risks, you can do so too. Do something.
People often say with pride, “I’m not interested in politics.” They might as well say, “I’m not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future, or any future.”
I finally declared a major. I am no longer majorless and say that I’m a bum going from class to class with no direction in life. I am now a bum with English and History as my directions in life. I could have gone with Spanish and could still do so I guess but I already know Spanish. Anyways, just wanted to let people know because I’m quite happy I finally chose something before advising yelled at me for my indecisive ways. And yes, I do despise math and science. I find those subjects boring, but hey, that’s just me. Anyways, if you are reading this, tell me any advice you might have if you are an English or History major. Or both.
This are all from Martin Luther King Jr, a man who needs no introduction from me. A great American, one that sacrificed much for his entire people. Not many can do that, or would want to. I find the quotes to fit the times we live in as well. These are not all the quotes I want to put of course, I will put more as time passes.
“Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.“
Just substitute Negroes with immigrants and we have today’s discrimination.
“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.“
“Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.“
So, this is another editorial like the one yesterday. It poses someone else’s opinion because right now I’m too busy to post my own. This editorial also agrees with my views. I don’t know where it comes from though, maybe the NY Times but I don’t have a link. Sorry. I’m just saying that the following are not my words. I’ll try to write something of my own later on but I can’t make any promises. School is taking over.
Published: October 22, 2007
Think of America’s greatest historical shames. Most have involved the singling out of groups of people for abuse. Name a distinguishing feature — skin color, religion, nationality, language — and it’s likely that people here have suffered unjustly for it, either through the freelance hatred of citizens or as a matter of official government policy.
We are heading down this road again. The country needs to have a working immigration policy, one that corresponds to economic realities and is based on good sense and fairness. But it doesn’t. It has federal inertia and a rising immigrant tide, and a national mood of frustration and anxiety that is slipping, as it has so many times before, into hatred and fear. Hostility for illegal immigrants falls disproportionately on an entire population of people, documented or not, who speak Spanish and are working-class or poor. By blinding the country to solutions, it has harmed us all.
The evidence can be seen in any state or town that has passed constitutionally dubious laws to deny undocumented immigrants the basics of living, like housing or the right to gather or to seek work. It’s in hot lines for citizens to turn in neighbors. It’s on talk radio and blogs. It’s on the campaign trail, where candidates are pressed to disown moderate positions. And it can be heard nearly every night on CNN, in the nativist drumming of Lou Dobbs, for whom immigration is an obsessive cause.
In New York, Gov. Eliot Spitzer has proposed allowing illegal immigrants to earn driver’s licenses. It is a good, practical idea, designed to replace anonymous drivers with registered competent ones. In show after show, Mr. Dobbs has trained his biggest guns on Mr. Spitzer, branding him with puerile epithets like ‘’spoiled, rich-kid brat” and depicting his policy as some sort of sanctuary program for the 9/11 hijackers. Someday there may be a calm debate, in Albany and nationally, about immigrant drivers. But with Mr. Dobbs at the megaphone, for now there is only histrionics and outrage.
Let’s concede an indisputable point: people should not be in the country illegally. But forget about the border for a moment — let’s talk about the 12 million who are already here. What should be done about them?
A. Deport them all.
B. Find out who they are. Distinguish between criminals and people who just want to work. Get them on the books. Make them pay what they owe — not just the income, Social Security, sales and property taxes they already pay, but all their taxes, and a fine. Get a smooth legal flow of immigrants going, and then concentrate on catching and deporting bad people.
C. Catch the few you can, and harass and frighten the rest. Treat the entire group as a de facto class of criminals, and disrupt or shout down anyone or any plan seen as abetting their evildoing.
Forget A. Congress tried a version of B, but it was flattened by outrage.
And so here we are at C. It’s a policy that can’t work; it’s too small-bore, too petty, too narrow. And all the while it’s not working, it can only lead to the festering of hate. Americans are a practical and generous people, with a tolerant streak a mile wide. But there is a combustible strain of nativism in this country, and it takes only a handful of match tossers to ignite it.
The new demagogues are united in their zeal to uproot the illegal population. They do not discriminate between criminals and the much larger group of ambitious strivers. They champion misguided policies, like a mythically airtight border fence and a reckless campaign of home invasions. And they summon the worst of America’s past by treating a hidden group of vulnerable people as an enemy to be hated and vanquished, not as part of a problem to be managed
Another editorial of what would really happen if the wall was built. Nothing. Nothing would happen. Once again I am using another editorial by Jorge Ramos, the best news anchor in the Hispanic network of Univision. Also, at the end I will post once again the video from Penn and Teller that shows the the wall in fact only causes a delay of three minutes to undocumented immigrants in their journey here. The wall alone is not a solution. It is a simple and ignorant solution to a complex problem, and complex problems require complex thinking, compromise and ultimately, a complex thought out answer. Here is the editorial, translated from Spanish to English by me.
The Wall: Three minutes of delay
Hunger stronger than fear
By Jorge Ramos Avalos
There are presents that are not wanted. They are uncomfortable, and far from being good for those who get them, they are things that are only enjoyed by those who give them away. This is the case of the wall between Mexico and the US.
A gift not wanted
Bush’s government is giving away a very expensive wall to different border town, but the problem is that the cities don’t want accept that gift.
It is true. The mayors of the border towns like Eagle Pass and Del Rio, both from Texas, don’t want a wall.
“The way to protect the border is not with the wall” Efrain Valdez told me, the mayor of Del Rio. The undocumented ” will just take 3 more minutes to cross over, but either way, he is going to come here.”
Three minutes of delays. That is all. But either way all undocumented will still cross. With tunnels, ladders, hiding in vehicles, swimming and jumping. Hunger is stronger than fear.
Expensive wall
Last year 265 miles of the wall were constructed, according to the Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff own report. Y he hopes to get the total of almost 700 miles this year.
The price? Beyond the sky. Some 70 millions for every mile. And all of that to cause a delay of three minutes to undocumented.
“The wall will give everyone a false of security”, Chad Foster commented in an interview, the mayor of Eagle Pass. Why construct a wall?” asks Foster. “If we already have a natural division called Bravo River (or rio Grande, like it is called in the US.
They already have cameras
Effectively the river has divided the countries since 1848 some 1,254 miles of the border between Mexico and Texas. Also, Mayor Foster assures us, that there are already agents from the sheriff’s office, customs, the National Guard and ICE patrolling the border.
“We ask to protect the Texas border with more technology”, not with a wall, commented Foster.
Careful. It is not that either mayor, along with a lot of others from Texas, want open borders with Mexico. But they don’t believe that the border will do anything to deter the flow of immigrants minute by minute.
Why do they come?
The wall is forceful action against an economic problem. As long as there is hunger and unemployment in Latin America, and food, jobs, an education, and better opportunities for immigrants in the US, they will continue to risk everything and cross illegally.
Last year 400 immigrants died as they tried to cross. The number is lightly less than the year before. But the number is still terrible and important.
Nothing -no the wall, not the California fires, not the raids, not anymore agents at the border and the anti-immigrant sentiments in the rest of the country- is stopping undocumented.
Dry Land
It is important to find another solution. And it is a clear one: legalize those who are already here and give visas to the those who coming behind them (and the US needs them).
The wall is not working to stop undocumented, only delaying them or sending to pass through more difficult routes, there is another important matter: water.
“That worries us”, Mayor Valdez told me, “because the wall will take away our use of the rio Grande; it will take away the water.”
95 percents of those who share the river with Mexico are private owners. Those ranchers would not be able to take their animals to the river so they could drink water. And it would be more complicated for Texans who want to use the river rater to irrigate their crops, since there would be a wall dividing them.
Mexico would win
There is more. The mayors are afraid that the precise moment the wall starts getting built, the river will automatically belong to Mexico.
The international treaty between Mexico and US establishes that the border line is exactly in the middle of the river. But by constructing the wall in the American side, the mayors believe that the US would be giving away territory (and their part of the river) to Mexico, not on the legal sense but very much a physical one.
That is why, like Mayor Foster told me. “We are ready to fight until the very end so that there is no border wall in Texas.
A wall in the border between Mexico and Texas, like it is talked about in by the Bush administration, would affect commerce, the environment, distribution of war, the physical boundaries in between both countries and the most ironic of all, it won’t comply the promise of stopping undocumented in their tracks.
It will only delay them on their way three minutes. Three.
The following video contains profanity throughout the entire thing and nudity at the very end.
