Immigrants are an economic Win for the US

The Huffington Post recently published an article on the economics of immigration by Dr Fariborz Ghadar. This article sited many different publications that show the economic benefit to the United States from immigration is a definite positive, despite the subterfuge offered up by the GOP.

“Recent labor statistics reveal that “on average, immigrants raise the overall standard of living of American workers by boosting wages and lowering prices.”

They also take away less jobs from worthy Americans than they have been accused of.

A special report by the Immigration Policy Center concluded that

“Although unemployed native workers who lack a high‐school diploma would seem to be in tight competition for jobs with recent immigrants who have a similar level of education, an analysis of differences between these two groups in terms of where they live, their job experience, and their age shows that they are far from being substitutes for one another.” The characteristics of immigrant and native workers vary substantially; thus, they are rarely interchangeable as the myth would lead us to believe.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-fariborz-ghadar

GOP cries foul when Obama does their job for them

The Republicans have repeatedly stopped immigration reform legislation from becoming law for the past ten years, so when President Obama made a move to allow a small subset of the immigrants awaiting changes to our immigration laws, the Republicans are throwing a fit.

The Republicans have filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court and are trying to get Obama’s efforts nullified. This is the same Supreme Court that they are also trying not to allow Obama to fill an empty spot left by the passing of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

The Republican’s friend of the court brief says,

“There is little doubt that [Obama] adopted the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (“DAPA”) program as part of an explicit effort to circumvent the legislative process,”

What the Republicans don’t mention is the fact that you can’t circumvent a legislative process that isn’t even happening.

The Republican’s promise of immigration reform has always been a lie. They keep saying they are for legal immigration and they want to reform the laws they know are broken, yet every opportunity to get something done in this area stops with them.

The real truth of the matter, is now completely obvious. They want immigration reform to be STRICTER than it is now, not more welcoming, or more efficient, or more useful to the nation as a whole. The Republican party views immigrants as threats and they want to slow down and make more difficult the importation of more new Americans, who will probably vote as Democrats.

The painful truth of that idea is that these new immigrants come from traditional Catholic countries and these new immigrants, if given the chance, would vote as conservative Republicans because of their religious beliefs, yet because of all the hate-mongering and harsh treatment of their predecessors, they are surely likely to vote as Democrats, who have been much more realistic and sympathetic to their plight.

If the Republicans could ever get out of their own way, they would be much more successful. But that’s like saying if Ferrari made their cars cheaper, they’d sell more of them. Both statements are obvious, true, but never going to happen.

Compare Presidential Candidates on Immigration

Presidential Candidates on immigration

The Immigration Force

FWD.US gives us a peek into what would it look like to have an immigration force rounding up people and disrupting businesses, familes and society in general.

 

Hilary Clinton drops the i-word

imagesHilary Clinton just vowed not to use the term “illegal alien” ever again.

 

She recognizes that this term minimizes the value of a portion of our society. This term insults millions of people who came here to make a better life for themselves but couldn’t wait for us to get around to fixing our immigration system, and who could blame them? We don’t do immigration reform in this country but once every couple of decades, and even then, it’s usually a president who ramrods a minimalistic version through after waiting forever for Congress to do its job.

Thanks Hilary. You just jumped to the top of the presidential candidate list for having compassion where most others show only contempt and blame.

Ann Coulter ignorant on immigrants

Adios-AmericaWhat Ann Coulter doesn’t understand about immigrants and immigration makes me wonder why she even bothers to talk about it at all. The fact that she can write a book and actually get it published, with all the distorted and untrue facts it contains, and then go on tour and speak publicly about this misinformation and speak about them as if they were true makes me wonder about our society. How far should we be allowed to abuse the term “freedom of speech,” and how far should we be allowed to go to defend this freedom when it contains so much that is blatantly untrue? Do we not have any responsibility to the public? Shouldn’t there at least be a warning label, “Caution, the ideas inside this book may not be anywhere close to the truth and any resemblance to real people and events may be purely coincidental.”

CNSnews.com recently wrote a piece about her book, “Adios America” and in it they stated,

“Coulter’s thesis is simple: Since Senator Teddy Kennedy, D-Mass., rammed through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, America’s immigration system has transformed from a device for enriching the nation for both native-born and immigrants into a scheme for importing anti-American voters.”

One of the problems with that statement is there are 50 years of evidence to back up such a statement. All you would have to do to verify this information is add up all the years since 1965 that had Republican presidents (the party she purports to defend in all her ramblings) to see if un-American voters were messing with our government unfairly. I counted 31 years that the US had a Republican president out of those 50 years; well over half.

So the majority of presidents since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 were Republican. Does that mean she is making the statement that Republicans are “anti-American voters” or is her thesis completely and utterly flawed?

Not all of her book is based on severely inaccurate statistics. She also apparently throws in a large amount of racism, apparently to make her facts sound more accurate.

In that same CNSnews.com article was this Anne Coulter gem,

“What made America America, Coulter argues, was a particular blend of Protestant religion and European civilization that led to the rise of the greatest nation in human history. What will unmake America, she continues, is a deliberate attempt to poison that blend with a flood of immigrants with wildly different values.”

One would expect this type of statement to come from organizations like the Klu Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation. There is just no masking the point of a message like this. What she is saying is if you are not a white european protestant, your blood line will pollute the pure American gene pool and we must get rid of you. Sounds eerily similar to fascist dictators we’ve heard from before.

Coulter goes on to argue that the number of undocumented immigrants currently residing in the USA today is 30 million and not the 11 million or so that are currently thought to be here by more responsible estimates. This is so wildly exaggerated it appears that Ms Coulter has no problem with facts that are corroborated by independent studies, peer reviewed research papers, non-partisan surveys, government census data, or any other useful type of trusted information. She just chooses not to bother to use that type of content in her writing at all. Why bother with researching multiple sources of information to see if your thesis is correct when all you have to do is write down whatever you want and be done with it.

As far as what makes this country great is concerned, Ms Coulter doesn’t wish to recognize all the different religions and peoples we have imported since the 1600s that has actually made our nation great up to this point, or any other historic milestone this country has achieved in the past, for that matter. She only counts the Protestant ones from European countries. Somehow, everyone else in the history of the United States didn’t really matter, including the unfortunate black folks we thought we needed so badly we kidnapped and brought here against their will. I guess the builders of this great nation brought Africans here to keep themselves company. The white Europeans must have done all the innovating, constructing, planting, harvesting, manufacturing and conquering all by themselves.

One of my favorite Coulterisms is when she was on The View and called out for being a descendant of immigrants herself. She flatly denied she was related to people who came from another country looking for a better life. Her ancestors were SETTLERS. Somehow these were not people who came from other countries, but who just magically came here and founded this nation, making her a native American and all native Americans becoming American Indians.

How convenient for her to have skipped the whole “immigrant” word altogether. Ancestral magic sounds cool. Her ancestors didn’t have to kill or steal or lie or renege on treaties or any of that stuff that would need to be apologized for. No admission of harming others or doing wrong. No pesky restitution necessary either. Her family history has been cleansed by the immaculate inception.

I’m betting the Scientologists fear her, for they will probably soon have to give up the claim to the newest religion in this country. The Bible of Anne Coulter should be coming soon, which begs two questions to be asked:

  1. Will she photoshop a selfie for the cover and make herself look even whiter than she already is and 20 years younger?
  2. Will it be available in Spanish?

The battle for the 14th Amendment

For as long as our constitution has been around, certain members of our community and their hired guns in Washington have tried to change our immigration laws in an effort to “keep our country white.” The 14th amendment has been under attack since it’s inception during the civil war.

This infographic helps to demonstrate the effects on such an attack.

14th Amendment2

GOP needs a dictionary

Ever get tired of hearing anything you want to do to help those less fortunate is a form of socialism? Let’s take a look at what the dictionary says about

 socialism:

1- any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2- a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.

So let’s be clear. If we are to be judged by how well we treat our fellow man, using the “socialism” card as a means to keep the government out of such endeavors is really just a cheap shot.

Should we start calling the GOP Fascists?

fascism:

1: often capitalized :  a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2:  a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control <early instances of army fascism and brutality — J. W. Aldridge>
So, as the Republicans want to control female reproductive rights and limit resources to gays, take away money from the aging and the poor and limit who can vote by enacting rigorous voting qualifications that leave out many of the poor, I would say that they are much closer to that definition than their opponents are to socialism.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/thats-not-what-socialism-means

H1b visa caps hinder our economy

Borui applied for an H-1B visa this year after creating his own company Polarr and hiring 3 Americans. Last week, he brought his story to Capitol Hill to advocate directly for immigration reform.

Posted by FWD.us on Tuesday, April 21, 2015

An American Iron Curtain

We are creating an American Iron Curtain

US Mexico border fence with barbed wire

When I was a boy growing up in the sixties and seventies, the only places we got our news was radio, TV & the newspaper. Being young, I wasn’t much on reading because I was having a difficult time learning the language. English is not the easiest language in the world to learn. Some of the rules still don’t make much sense, so, as a kid, I mainly just stuck with TV, and even then I wasn’t much interested in the news. Grown-up TV was scary.

The John F. Kennedy assassination, then the Bobby Kennedy assasination, Martin Luther King & Malcolm X murdered too, the Vietnam war, Watergate, the civil rights riots, the Black Painters.

And that was just in this country.

The news coming out of Russia was even scarier. People who disagreed with the government disappeared, the KGB was out to get everyone, The Gulag or forced labor and torture camps sounded like hell on earth,  their highly censored media, and severely restricted travel and career paths. Our freedoms were as countless as the stars at night and you could thank heaven for growing up in this wonderful country.

For a long time (all throughout the Cold War) it seemed as if our whole national identity revolved around how superior we were to the Soviet Union, the number 2 world power at the time. We compared ourselves to Russia in almost everything: who had the most gold medals in the olympics, the first man in space, the first satellite in orbit, the first man on the moon, the most nuclear weapons. . . and of course, we compared our cultures; we had freedom– they didn’t.

In America, you could go anywhere you wish, freely, and without restriction.  In the USSR,  you needed travel papers before leaving your state, or entering another. In the USSR if you were born into a farmer’s family, you would grow up to be a farmer too. In America you could grow up to be whatever you wanted to be.

In America our society thrived on diversity. We imported some of the best minds from around the globe and became a super power because of it. In the USSR their lack of diversity, and their rigid control of everything, kept growth, innovation, and prosperity to a minimum.

berlinwall

In the USSR there were very scary structures like the Berlin wall, that symbolized their leader’s fear of freedom and transparency.

This wall served two physical purposes:

  1. To keep their own people in,
  2. To keep meddling westerners and their ideas out.

The wall had social, emotional, psychological and philosophical effects on those living on both sides of the border too. Families were separated, many people were unable to return to their jobs or their homes, and the desire to leave grew more intense for those who found themselves trapped within.

In the USA we can come and go as we see fit. The world is our playground.

iron-curtain-europeIn the sixties and seventies we were told, in school and in the news, that people trying to get in or out through the Berlin wall were shot and killed by guards in towers. They had bright search lights to find people trying to get in or out in the dark of night. The images we were shown were cold and loveless and this wall, as well as all the other walls set up to segregate the west from the USSR, were given a cold and loveless name, “The Iron Curtain.” Just the sound of it coming out of the TV was enough to create nightmares in your dark and silent room at night. This was definitely something we would never do to our people.  This wall was evil, and so were the controlling ideologies behind it.

It was something that should be stopped.

Growing up in the USA may have given me a slightly biased point of view regarding much of what we were told and shown, but many of the facts were quite visible; such as the Berlin Wall itself, its guard towers, search lights, and armed guards, barbed wire, dogs, minefields. A lot of thought, time, energy and money went into the creating and maintaining of this security system.

Today I find the news equally as disturbing as when I was a child. Millions of Americans are living nightmares that we are creating for ourselves. We are building a fence between our country and Mexico for many of the same reasons the Russians did in East Germany and all along the Soviet Union’s borders with NATO countries. Today we are deploying more than just armed border agents, some dogs and a big fence. We also have ground sensors, spotlights, double walls separated by many yards of open space, barbed wire, and even drones. There is talk of sending the National Guard to the border. The techniques of the past with the weapons of today.

We are spending more per year on border security than in any other single government agency. We aim to keep people out of our more prosperous nation and protect ourselves from the percieved negative influences of Mexico and beyond.

us-iron-curtain

We, too, are dividing families and communities that once moved freely back and forth from Mexico to the US and back again. Many migrant workers who used to come north during harvest season and go back home to Mexico when the harvesting is done, are now forced to either stay here in the US for fear of not being able to return to work when the picking seasons start up again, or stay in Mexico and search for new places to live and new means of sustaining the family.

Going back to the early sixties and seventies and the Berlin wall, even with all of the money and effort and labor that went into that fortification, it was far from 100% effective. It is said there were around 2,000 people who escaped through the wall. There were always people looking for ways to get something in, or smuggle something out. It is estimated that around 200 people were killed trying to escape.

So far, aside from the anonymous postings of hateful cowards, few people have publicly said they were in favor of shooting people trying to immigrate to the United States like they did in Germany and in various other countries in the Soviet bloc. “Joe the Plumber”  is a notable exception, and some so-called Patriots on the Mexico-American border. Herman Cain spoke of electrifying the border fence, but he quickly back-pedaled when called on it.

Someone should tell Joe, Herman, and all those “Patriot” nuts at the border that the Berlin wall has come down. It was viewed as a testament to the failure of Communism as well as the relentless attraction of Democracy, a sign that all men seek freedom and self-determination as a meaningful and important part of human nature that cannot be separated from us by any man made object.

President Ronald Reagan gave a speech shortly before the wall was taken down. He criticized the wall and pushed for its destruction. In that speech was a simple philosophy behind such idea:

“We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.”

6/12/87 President Ronald Reagan

That would also mean it would be analogous to say prohibiting human liberty would be anathema to world peace, too.

Are the anti-immigration reform people opposed to World Peace, because a good part of their platform doesn’t seem to support that idea very much.

The old Soviet Union is far from the only country that tried and failed to overly control it’s citizens. There are many other examples of a failed fortified stance against immigration/emigration.

Every day there are news reports of security breaches in the Israel-Gaza wall, the Egypt-Gaza wall, and once in a while someone infiltrates or escapes from North Korea.

No wall ever built has been 100% effective at keeping people in or out.

berlin-wall-soldier

The great wall of China, arguably the largest, longest living, and most expensive border security barrier ever built, failed to keep many invaders out. It is a living testament for the entire world that erecting barriers to keep people out of one area or another does not work, and it stands as proof positive that you can spend all the money you want and take centuries to build something, but you still won’t prevent the entry of people who are determined to get in. Not even the walls and moats surrounding relatively tiny pieces of real estate, such as castles and forts kept people out who were highly motivated to get in. We have tried for aeons to fence things off and keep people out or keep them in. Prisons have escapees. Alcatraz was hugely successful, having a strong current and  hundreds of yards of bay surrounding their fences and guard towers, yet a few people escaped from there too.

Even if we were to figure out how to build an Alcatraz like system all along the 2000 miles of border between the US and Mexico, and even if we had the money to build it, that is not the only access point that is vulnerable to people wanting in or out of our country. We have airports, shipping ports, thousands of miles of coastlands, as well as our border to the north with Canada, and our Hawaiian Islands as well as the thousands of Islands in and around our country. It would take generations of Americans working full-time and many trillions of tax dollars to fortify all of our access points. It would take untold billions of dollars to install security systems capable of monitoring every person’s movement, and billions to install devices on each citizen or visitor within our country to ensure they have a right to be here.

Which brings up a very important question: What would a 100% secure America look like? Prison? East Germany? The Gaza strip? Israel? Would you want your children to grow up in a place like this? Would you want to live in even a colorful, sunshiny prison? Where would we vacation, on a beautiful sandy beach surrounded by high fences with concertina wire and armed guards in towers with spotlights at night?

If the old USSR isn’t a good enough reminder for us that isolation is a nation killer, we will surely follow in their footsteps, walling off our nation and isolating ourselves from much of the outside world, stifling innovation, killing our economy and relegating us to the land “formerly known as the USA.” We will have to watch as a new super power emerges to lead us into the 21st or 22nd century.

Is this the legacy we want to leave behind?

us-medico-border-barbed-wire

Do we want to be known as the generation that lead to the end of our status as the leader of the free world?

If you would like to prevent this from happening, please enter your email address and become a part of the movement that seeks to end this un-American ideal. Join me and the thousands of other people working to ensure we leave a healthy, vibrant country to our children and grandchildren. They will thank us for it.