Editorial: Obama Flinches on Immigration - NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/opinion/24tue3.html

March 24, 2009

Editorial: Obama Flinches on Immigration

In a little-noticed act of political faintheartedness, the Obama administration has pulled back from nominating Thomas Saenz, a highly regarded civil-rights lawyer and counsel to the mayor of Los Angeles, to run the Justice Department's civil rights division.

Mr. Saenz, the former top litigator in Los Angeles for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or Maldef, was privately offered the job in January. The floating of his name led to fierce outbursts from anti-immigrant groups and blogs, which detest him for being so good at what he does.

He was a leader of the successful fight to block California's Proposition 187, an unconstitutional effort to deny social services and schooling to illegal immigrants. He has defended Latino day laborers who were targets of misguided local crackdowns, from illegal police stings to unconstitutional anti-solicitation ordinances. An editorial in Investor's Business Daily slimed Mr. Saenz by calling him "an open-borders extremist" and said Maldef wanted to give California back to Mexico.

None of it was true, but it was apparently too much for the White House. Mr. Saenz was ditched in favor of Maryland's labor secretary, Thomas Perez, who has a solid record but is not as closely tied to immigrant rights.

Immigrant advocates are stuck with the sinking feeling that Mr. Obama's supposed enthusiasm for immigration reform will wilt under pressure and heat. Representative Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, found it sadly unsurprising that a lawyer could be rejected for the nation's top civil-rights job because he had stood up for civil rights. "In what other position do you find that your life experience, your educational knowledge and commitment to an issue actually hurts you?" he asked.

Mr. Obama may have avoided a nasty fight this time. But if he is ever going to win the battle to put 12 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship, he will to have to confront and dismantle the core restrictionist argument: that being an illegal immigrant is an unpardonable crime, one that strips away fundamental protections and forgives all manner of indecent treatment.

The Constitution's bedrock protections do not apply to just the native-born. The suffering that illegal immigrants endure — from raids to workplace exploitation to mistreatment in detention — is a civil-rights crisis. It cannot be left to fester while we wait for the big immigration bill that may or may not arrive under this president.

Mr. Saenz would have been an ideal candidate to reaffirm values that have been lost in the poisoned immigration debate, had Mr. Obama dared to nominate him.
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http://www.reuters.com/article/newsMaps/idUSTRE52N0NM20090324

Mexico offers $2 million rewards for drug lords

Mon Mar 23, 2009 11:34pm EDT

 

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico on Monday offered multiple rewards of up

to $2 million for information leading to the capture of the country's drug kingpins, including Mexico's most-wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.

Mexico published a list of more than 30 men the government says are leading the country's five main cartels, including Guzman's powerful Pacific-coast Sinaloa gang and the Gulf cartel in northeastern Mexico, whose feared Zeta hitmen are known for beheading rivals.

Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said Mexico's security forces would accept tips from rival drug gangs. "We don't rule out that those giving us information are part of (organized crime) groups. The important thing is to capture the wanted person," Medina Mora told a news conference.

Mexico's President Felipe Calderon has made controlling rampant drug violence his administration's top priority and has sent 45,000 troops across the country to break up the gangs.

Last week, soldiers captured two capos, but despite a string of arrests and historic drug busts, violence surged to a record 6,300 drug-related killings last year. Washington fears the drug war is spilling over into the United States.

The conflict is also scaring off tourists and investment along Mexico's border just as the global economic crisis drags the country into recession.

(Reporting by Adriana Barrera and Julio Ruiz, editing by Alan Elsner)

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From Latinopoliticsblog.com: Sunday: What we are reading and working on post

http://latinopoliticsblog.com/2009/03/22/sunday-what-we-are-reading-and-working-on-post/

Updated info on the Esteban Nuñez Case

Sunday: What we are reading and working on post

March 22nd, 2009 ~

Seneca and I have been working on a few new blog posts, which will be posted soon. In the meantime, I thought I would share with you some things that I have been reading, writing about, and pondering for the week ahead. Feel free to share your thoughts as well.

• "Are the immigration raids 'un-American'?"
• Obama to Push CIR (Comprehensive Immigration Reform)
• "White Collar Criminals, The New 'Illegals'"
• And Finally, "The Big Takover: The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power.. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution."

Regarding the final article, "The Big Takover," I particularly want to highlight this portion:

"People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy [AIG CEO] put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers."

This sums up how I feel about the latest stunt that AIG pulled. For the past eight years, we have lived in an environment where our phone calls were subject to wiretapping, we endure long lines at the airport dumping our pockets, purses, taking off shoes, belts, etc., yet we did not implement any meaningful regulation of these huge financial institutions, who have the ability to hold our lives hostage. And we, the tax payers, are left holding the bag of bad debts resulting from poor Vegas style decision making.

Tags: Economics · Immigration

 

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http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/03/22/Illegal_immigrants_lose_jobs_edge/UPI-48121237756594/

Illegal immigrants lose jobs edge

Published: March 22, 2009 at 5:16 PM

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MORRISTOWN, Tenn., March 22 (UPI) -- The recession and government crackdowns are causing illegal immigrants to lose their foothold in the U.S. workforce, experts say.

The New York Times (NYSE:NYT) reported Sunday that while jobs are few these days, many illegal workers are taking whatever work they can find, regardless of the pay or conditions, and have no desire to return to their homelands.

"Most of the things I got are right here," said Balbino Lopez Hernandez, who came to Tennessee illegally from Mexico. "I got my family, my wife, my kids. Everything is here."

Lopez, 28, lives and works in Morristown, Tenn., where most of the help for illegal workers comes from churches. Lopez said he networks with them to find odd jobs, the newspaper said.

Nationwide, Hispanic immigrants had greater job losses in 2008 than did Hispanics born in the United States or black workers, the Pew Hispanic Center says.

Chris Baker, a sociologist at Walters State Community College in Morristown, said it has been illegal immigrants working for less money and no benefits that have kept many factories in the region afloat.

"The employers hire Latinos, and after that, they leave," he said. "It goes from white to black to Latino to -- gone."

 

Education for Liberation! Join Up!
Peter S. Lopez aka: Peta
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Humane-Rights-Agenda/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/THIRD-WORLD-NEWS/

http://www.NetworkAztlan.com