Immigration Reform Is Still Possible — With a Strong Social Movement

2021 didn’t bring anything like the progress many immigrants and their allies were hoping for. But sustained grassroots organizing could turn the situation around in 2022.

By David L. Wilson, Truthout

January 10, 2022

A year ago, it seemed possible that the country might get its first truly positive immigration reform since the 1986 “Reagan amnesty.”

The incoming Biden administration was proposing legislation that would allow most of the country’s 10 to 11 million undocumented immigrants to apply for legal status. The outlines were subsequently included in the Build Back Better bill, but the Democrats had to pare the reform back in order to win approval from the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, under the arcane Senate reconciliation process. The Democrats’ most recent proposal was just a limited parole for some 6.5 million immigrants, and even that concession wasn’t enough for MacDonough. She nixed the plan on December 16.[…]

Read the full article:

https://truthout.org/articles/immigration-reform-is-still-possible-with-a-strong-social-movement/

 

Rally at SCOTUS Photo: Tom Williams/ Cq-Roll/Getty Images

Are there “foreigners” in the U.S. working class?

Judis, who has decades of experience on the U.S. left, succeeded in setting forth a clear and concise formulation of a socialist position in favor of immigration restrictions. In doing so, he inadvertently demonstrated how completely detached that position is from reality.

By David L. Wilson, MR Online

January 3, 2022

The libertarian magazine Reason ran an eye-catching headline in its August-September issue: “How Mass Immigration Stopped American Socialism.”

The article itself doesn’t do much more than reveal its authors’ ignorance about socialism and about socialist labor organizing in the early twentieth century, but it highlights a problem that has troubled U.S. socialists for more than a century. Pro-immigrant positions are natural for leftists; they have no trouble recognizing the dehumanization and the appeals to racism and xenophobia that underlie rightwing rhetoric against “open borders” and “illegal aliens.” But does socialist support for immigrants’ rights drive away U.S.-born workers?[…]

Read the full article:

https://mronline.org/2022/01/03/are-there-foreigners-in-the-u-s-working-class/

 

Immigrants and supporters march on May Day. Photo: David Bacon

My Conversation With a Coup Plotter

I found myself wondering how someone as obviously intelligent and well-educated as Eastman could present such flimsy arguments. Was he just lying, or had rightwing ideology warped his mind to the point where he could believe what he was writing?

By David L. Wilson, CounterPunch

December 9, 2021

Claremont Institute legal scholar John Eastman is now best known for his efforts to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election, but in August 2015 he was still a professor at the Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law and someone whose legal opinions the New York Times considered worthy of publication.

The occasion back then was a proposal from candidate Donald Trump to end birthright citizenship. The current requirement that children born here be recognized as U.S. citizens was “the biggest magnet for illegal immigration,” he argued.[…]

Read the full article:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/12/09/my-conversation-with-a-coup-plotter/

Media Don’t Factcheck Right-Wing Migration Myths

[T]his imbalance is typical of much corporate media immigration coverage. Right-wing media figures and Republican politicians get little pushback when they promote evidence-free, often absurd claims about incentives for unauthorized immigration.

By David L. Wilson, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

December 1, 2021

Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked a bizarre question at President Joe Biden’s November 3 press briefing. The president seemed to misunderstand the question, which referred to potential settlements of a lawsuit stemming from the Trump administration’s notorious 2017–18 family separation policy. Biden bungled his response, apparently calling reports about the settlement “garbage.”

Not surprisingly, the media ran with the story of Biden’s blunder. Doocy’s question, on the other hand, was mostly ignored or played down.[…]

Read the full article:

https://fair.org/home/media-dont-factcheck-right-wing-migration-myths/

Photo: Los Angeles Times

The “border crisis” numbers don’t add up

[T]he “border crisis” narrative ignores several important differences between 2000 and 2021—the number of successful border crossings, the legal situation of the migrants who arrive, and the impact of a global pandemic.

By David L. Wilson, MR Online

October 29, 2021

In July, environmental activist Laiken Jordahl tweeted out a short video featuring what he called “the almighty border wall,” a section of fence at the Coronado National Forest in Arizona. The fence there includes several gates that need to be kept open at times of heavy rain. Without them, explained Jordahl, a staffer at Tucson’s Center for Biological Diversity, debris would accumulate behind the structure and floodwaters would eventually knock the wall down.

The gates were wide open. The only barrier was a few strands of barbed wire: anyone could easily have clipped the wire and walked through. No Border Patrol agents were in sight; neither were any would-be migrants.[…]

Read the full article:

https://mronline.org/2021/10/29/the-border-crisis-numbers-dont-add-up/

Photo: David Bacon

Let’s Call the “Border Crisis” What It Is: Another Big Lie From the Right

Undocumented immigrants aren’t actually a problem, but the Republican Party has framed them “as criminals and lawbreakers and a grave threat to the nation in order to motivate and mobilize the Republican base, to great effect,” Massey told Truthout. Up until now, the Democrats have failed to push back, he added.

By David L. Wilson, Truthout

July 20, 2021

Republican politicians and commentators spent the last week of June promoting their claim that this year’s increase in apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border constitutes — in the words of Fox News host Sean Hannity — “a crisis of a monumental scale.”

 

The campaign’s high point came on June 30 when former president Donald Trump visited a stretch of the border wall near Pharr, Texas, and delivered a number of “questionable statements” about his administration’s supposed enforcement successes.[…]

 

Read the full article:

https://truthout.org/articles/lets-call-the-border-crisis-what-it-is-another-big-lie-from-the-right/

 

GOP pols tour the border in March. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

It’s the US Government’s Immigration Policy That’s Illegal

“The violation of asylum seekers’ rights over the past three years under both Trump and Biden demonstrates how easily a president can ignore and even defy the law — especially when the victims are poor or marginalized and not enough of us speak out.”

By David L. Wilson, Jacobin

July 12, 2021

There’s a crisis on the imaginary line that separates the United States from Mexico, but it’s not the one politicians and media outlets have been talking about.

Earlier this year, the US political class was focused on a supposed “surge” in migration and on serious — but not unprecedented — failures in the treatment of unaccompanied minors. This distracted attention from two far more serious issues: the Trump administration’s misnamed Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), now discontinued, and the ongoing use of the US health code’s Title 42 to exclude asylum seekers from entering the country.[…]

Read the full article:

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/us-immigration-policy-legality-title-42-biden-trump-asylum-mpp-border-surge-human-rights/