Thanks to Trump, There Is No Shame In Racism

Today a father was speaking about the bullying his son endured in the public school system in Michigan. Instead of a unified sympathetic response to the shameful display of racism, someone piped up with, “So why didn’t you stay in Mexico?”

This public display of racism would have been rare in recent years past, but now has become commonplace among Trump supporters who feel it is their patriotic duty to call out minorities whenever the opportunity presents itself. The ensuing public outcry of racism and shame does not phase these people. Their president uses racial remarks and public policy to harm immigrants and minorities all the time, so their show of support is now a display of national pride for them.

How far our national reputation for standing up for the little guy and treating everyone with the same degree of fairness and justice has fallen. To be fair, the United States has never been a consistent, safe-haven for minorities, even though our Statue of Liberty reflects a different attitude. We have struggled with our relationship with immigrants throughout our entire history, with relatively brief passeges of love and respect for the people who left everything behind to make their lives in a new land.

Ever since Trump announced his run for the presidency, racism has become a front and center issue that has taken half of our nation into a direction that seeks to humiliate and deter people from coming to America. This position has been proven time and time again to be a losing position.

If it were not for immigrants, our nation would not be a quarter as powerful and strong as it is today. Nearly half of the wealthiest companies on the planet are American companies built by and staffed by immigrants. a Citigroup and Oxford University report found that two-thirds of U.S. GDP expansion since 2011 was “directly attributable to migration.”

Making immigration more difficult is like turning off future GDP growth and returning to an agricultural nation, leaving future industrial and economic growth to every other country on the planet that is more open to the hungry and energetic immigrants.

The United States is losing its position as a global economic leader, and killing immigration is why.

The Invisible Wall

Recently Trump claimed to have begun building his big beautiful wall and even had a plaque dedicating this section to himself as the first section of his border wall.

Now, as a point of fact, this section of the wall was built in place of an older barrier that was dilapidated and in need of replacement and was ordered to be rebuilt by then President Obama, who also authorized the funds.

This is not a new wall.

This was not his victory.

Since we cannot trust what Trump says, let’s look at what he’s actually done.

Trump has taken money from the military budget, against the objections of the Pentagon, and is trying to repurpose those funds to build the border wall. My mother taught me that when you take something that doesn’t belong to you, without being asked, It’s called “stealing.” It also makes you wonder how much of the new and highly expanded military budget, money the Pentagon didn’t even ask for, might also be “taken” to build his wall in the future.  I thought the whole big idea of building the wall was that Mexico was going to pay for it. That’s where he got his big applause. Apparently, that line was just a ruse. We are going to pay for this wall, and we aren’t going to have a say about it.

I guess we’ll just send Mexico an invoice or something.

Without a doubt, the Trump administration cannot be trusted.

Trump has put up some pretty impressive invisible barriers, though, while at the same time built a big beautiful door to which he invites conflicts on the world stage, including the possibility of wars on various fronts.

He has reduced funding to the United Nations, tried to leverage our allies, you know the ones we worked with to keep fascism from taking over the free world for 70 years or so, into contributing more toward the UN based on his vast and highly unsuccessful Real Estate experience. The United Nations is what you would call an invisible barrier, stopping would-be dictators and fascists from invading and taking over other nations. Russia, obviously, isn’t a member.

Trump also withdrew the US from the Human Rights Council, an organization that America used to pride themselves as being a part of to make the world a better place to live. This actually paved the way for America to befriend dictators and despots who live outside the law.

Which brings us to the fact that Trump has insulted and infuriated our allies, while at the same time tried to build relationships with the world’s most notorious dictators.

Talk about a destabilizing influence.

Another invisible wall Trump has recently torn down is his threat to withdraw Hundreds of Millions of dollars of aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, with the expressed purpose of trying to get them to stop the asylum caravans coming to our southern border.

Trump, if there was a fire in your kitchen, would you turn up the heat to the stove? Grab a can of gasoline, perhaps?

People are fleeing these countries because of poverty and crime. Taking money away from these governments will NOT make this problem go away–it will make it WORSE!

What we should be doing is giving more money or support to these countries. If we could help train their police departments and help them reduce crime, while also increasing investment in these countries to fight poverty and promote a happy and thriving middle class, then fewer citizens of these countries will want to walk for months to get here. Let’s face it, walking for thousands of miles is not anyone’s Plan A–it’s a last-ditch effort to stay alive.

The money we send to these countries is an invisible wall, keeping other nations out of our back yard. Right now, without our support, these countries are open for business to any other country that wishes to help support them in their effort to create a better economy.

Now that this invisible wall is collapsing, we are going to have Chinese and Russian influences and whoever else wants to encroach upon our sovereignty at our southern border, and our former allies are going to watch from the sidelines because you told them our “Patriotism” was all we needed and they could just go jump off a bridge.

Nice Trump. What are you going to do for an encore, play the fiddle as our nation burns to the ground?

AS you can see, international relations, or a lack thereof, form an invisible barrier to threats from foreign nations. We had some pretty good ones, but Trump doesn’t like those. He likes the ones he can touch and put his name on. The problem is, those kinds of walls don’t work like you think they will. Just ask Rome, China, or Germany, and all the other countries that tried to build physical barriers to keep threats out. Invisible barriers work better than physical ones. They also make more friends, and that’s one thing we could sure use more of these days.

 

Undocumented Immigrants and Taxes

Unlike Donald Trump, the first American President in decades who refused to release his tax returns, an undocumented immigrant showed her tax forms and proved she paid $300 into a system that refuses to acknowledge her or give her any benefits in return.

Undocumented immigrants not paying taxes has been a right wing lie for centuries, yet proof of the contrary has never seemed to slow down the haters in the least.

Comments on her disclosure are proving once again that facts don’t seem to make anti-immigrant hate mongers change their tunes.

In fact, they seem to believe that if they shout their hate louder, then maybe they can drown out the facts and restore their faith in their all-American fantasy tale that immigrants are bad for America.

The fact that our nation’s entire history is one huge immigrant success story doesn’t seem to faze the ultra-conservatives much, and hundreds of years of their vociferous dribblings don’t give me any hope it will stop any time soon, either.

So, in the mean-time, Dreamers, keep up the good fight, and leave the bad fight to the haters, who, in the end, will be the losers, for fate ultimately validates the righteous.

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

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.

 

Todd Schulte on mass deportations

Unknown-1A great article on what mass deportations would do to our country by Todd Shulte, the president of FWD.US, an immigration reform advocacy group. This article goes into some good statistics and helps to visualize what Donald Trump’s immigration policy would really do to our country and the people who live in it.

It’s one thing to say something provocative and get lots of people’s attention. It’s another thing to actually do what you’re talking about, and if Trump does get elected and he actually tries to mass deport 11.5 million people, this will not be a pretty place to live.

I also suspect that foreign investment in this country would plummet. Who would want to build factories or buy companies in a country that treats foreigners with such disdain?

Zuckerberg vs Trump

UnknownDonald Trump wants to deport all undocumented immigrants in the US. He’s said it many times. That seems to be his platform. He says Mexicans love him because he employs so many.

Mark Zuckerberg employs a lot of immigrants, not necessarily Mexicans, specifically, but immigrants just the same. Mark wants to help immigrants get access to legal status so they can continue to contribute to society.

One Billionaire wants to help immigrants, the other wants to vilify them.

Mark was recently quoted in Inc magazine as saying, “[D]eporting 11.5 million people would cost U.S. taxpayers $400 to $600 billion dollars, and would take at least 20 years to complete. Even worse, this mass deportation would reduce our GDP by $1.7 trillion–over 5 percent. Many industries would be hit hard, others–like agriculture, construction and hospitality–would be devastated.”

These numbers would suggest that Donald Trump doesn’t particularly care about our economy. Either that, or he really hasn’t studied the problem at all, and like all good reality TV personalities, he’s just running  for the fame and publicity.

Mark Zuckerberg is younger, wealthier and obviously smarter. Too bad he’s not running for President.

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

Citizenship for Sale?

A Stanford professor is promoting the idea of selling citizenship for $50k.

Every year there are many thousands of people waiting for lady luck to approve their green card via the lottery system.

Very few of them win.

Some countries allow people to invest $50k or $100k or more, in order to become a citizen of that nation. They reason this system brings jobs and stimulates economic growth. We, in fact, have a similar visa program already, but this is for investors and business people.

What about just plain selling citizenship?

This is purported to help solve our undocumented immigrant problem by giving them an alternative to going back home and also helps expedite a currently overloaded backlog. It should also help bring in money to the government, possibly to help pay for this system.

The non-wealthy could pay over time. Kinda like an installment plan or credit card.

So, get the new “Visa” card. (and don’t leave home without it : )

Click here to see the video

So, how do you feel about this idea?

Immigrants are not the bad guy


New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg offers his views on immigrants. Coming from a state with an estimated half a million undocumented immigrants, you could bet he knows a little bit about them.