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April 18, 2007

Death threats

Bloggers are under attack: death threats to Kathy Sierra, and an international response.

In these days, that people are simply throwing around death threats as if they were candy, it might be worth to revisit wikipedia:

A death threat is a threat (often made anonymously) against a person to kill him or her. Death threats are often intended to intimidate victims (such as dissuading them from pursuing a criminal investigation or an advocacy campaign). In other cases, people use death threats to manipulate behavior. Historically death threats were carried out against wealthy jews during the Spanish Inquisition. ...
Death threats are most commonly made against public figures, though they are also made against less public figures. In many states and jurisdictions, death threats are a criminal offense. If the threat is made against a governmental figure, it can also be treason.
Sometimes, death threats are made as part of a wider campaign of abuse against a person or group of people (see terrorism, mass murder).

Sadly, death threats are usually just the beginning, the opening shot of a very intimate conflict - there is nothing that the person threatened may do to avoid this, and since there is no crime yet, it is very difficult to get the police involved. Sometimes, as it happens in other countries, it is usually the police the one issuing the threats!

Times do change, and in this country, the USA, it is still a criminal offense to make a death threat. They do go on, however, as Chris Prillo points out:

It's worse when you know who that person is - or if they're not all that anonymous in the first place. I've dealt with my fair share of bullies (both before and after high school) - and in a few cases, was able to weather the situations long enough to seek some sort of resolution with the other parties.

All we read about in the news is about death threats to death threats to mayors, to the president of Virginia Tech, to editors, to bloggers. What importance does one more death threat have? Especially when there is only one witness?

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August 16, 2006

Race and racism revived

Is the issue of race forgotten already?
Clearly, people tend to forget that which is more unsavory:

At least in the abstract most Americans disavow bigotry. They feel that it's shameful that American citizens are being discriminated against because of the color of their skin. Nonetheless, it's still happening. Unfortunately, it's no longer politically correct to talk about racism. In many circles it's passé, "too sixties."
And living in the American South, as an immigrant, I can feel the racism and inequality in a daily basis: from the fact that my real friends are all immigrants, to the stupid redhead nurse that talks to me slow and in a loud voice, as if I were somehow incapable of advanced rational thought, unnerve me. The people that look at me, Latino, and decide that I am not white enough for their purposes, or that are amazed at the fact that I speak a good kind of English, or even the ones that decide that I would be a good addition to their stable of international diverse friends: you know, because I have to demonstrate internationalism.
Interesting are the locals that do not know what to make of me, Latino: and then I remember that this is a class society, and to those I reserve the treatment that somebody taught me, one in which you have to give me my due.

Lastly, and more painful, is to see the effect that this undercurrent of racism is having on me, on us: I have to listen to a Mexican waiter expound his Caucasian virtues: fair skin, father with blue eyes, tall, almost local.
And then I realize that that waiter is the voice of all of us, all of us trying to be white, to fit in, to betray our roots for the promise of belonging.

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July 5, 2005

It is personal

Winston-Salem is a small town, and all your sins come back to haunt you rather fast.
I was at a bar three years ago, talking to somebody, and out of nowhere one of the Harpies materialized, yelling and demanding that I show my passport to her, asking all kind of questions, and yelling me that I was in her country, and to get out of her country.
She was angry just because I could speak English.
So I filed that under Xenophobic racist person, and let it rest.
Fast forward to this spring, and she is suddenly going to the same places my friends and I frequent. Again, she is being completely manipulative, cold, twisted and every little bit as racist as she was three years ago. I didn't recognize little L**ra until she played one of her numbers on a friend of mine, when she labeled him and started tacking insulting and libelous nicknames to him, all of these according to color and nationality, as it is her hobby.
What do you do on the face of such complete disrespect for the dignity of a person? How do you tackle such monsters, and stop them from spewing their hatred in society? I wonder how to deal with a person like this, a teacher, with so disgusting a personality, and values so low as to be repugnant.

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March 31, 2005

Human hunt

It is Mexican (and others) immigrants hunting season. You just have to get with the Minuteman Project, and you get to act vigilante on the US border with Mexico. Concerns are obvious because of the hateful nature of the invitation, and as a mayor says

"They are going to draw every misfit, every renegade, everyone with an ax to grind about ethnic preference," said Ray Borane, mayor of Douglas, Ariz., a border town that will be ground zero for much of the month. "They are not welcome here."

But it is going to be bad, notwithstanding what that guy Bush says.
picture this: at night, in the desert, uninformed people with guns and prejudices get together to stop others from coming into the country. They are not trained, some of them are racists and supremacists, and will most likely react with violence to minor threats. Their quarry are desperate people, people that have already paid around $3,000 to $5,000 to cross a river and then walk through the desert looking for opportunities and a better life. They are already risking their life, they are risking their life savings and their earnings from the next two or three years, and know that they can not go back.
What happens when the strongest sword hits the strongest shield?

This has written massacre all over it.

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June 28, 2004

Asylum and The Terminal

refugeechildren250.jpgThe stupidly inane The Terminal seemed to convey the impression to unaware Americans that the Customs people are actually kind, loving, and would let you live in a airport if you had no visa. Or no country.
Bullshit.
If you happen to arrive from a country that has a visa program, and you do not know it because they changed the rules, they will deport you. That happened to a journalist from England, former resident of the USA, with a child born in the USA, and married to a US citizen.
Now, instead of a highly connected journalist, think of any tourist coming here from Mexico: deported, stripped, made to sign a confession and waiving all your rights to defense.
If you are a refugee, you may spend months under arrest, as it has happened to children: they are jailed along with adults, subject to strip searches and deprived of all rights. Lawyer? You are kidding.
And this is prevalent all over the USA: Amnesty International has been very vocal about how the USA treats asylum seekers as criminals.

So, please spare me the naive and almost criminally negligent platitude of that movie. Sickening. The reality would be oh so much harsher, but I suppose we have seen enough torture for a year. Or we are getting inured to it.

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June 22, 2004

AgJOBS endorsers

Further on the AgJOBS bill, here is the list of the organizations endorsing it:

Continue reading "AgJOBS endorsers" »

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AgJOBS 1645

Once again, election year, and this time both candidates are in a race to lure the Latino vote. The tool of choice is now the AgJOBS 1645 bill, which according to PCUSA, could help the sitatino of immigrnats that labor here in the USA in appalling conditions

The earned adjustment clause allows persons who can prove that they have lived and worked in the U.S. for at least 100 days in the last year to gain Temporary Resident status immediately, and Permanent Resident status after 3-6 more years of farm labor. In order to facilitate the reunion of families who have been separated by immigration laws, Temporary/Permanent Resident status would also be extended to spouses and children of laborers, though they would not qualify for employment when classified as Temporary Residents. Keeping families together and enabling reunification of immigrant families is a stated priority in PC(USA) policy2; the inclusion of the possibility of earned adjustment for spouses and children in the AgJOBs bill is one of the strongest points of the legislation.

Unlike the bill that Bush proposed last year, which ignored the status of immigrants relabeling them as "temporary workers", the S. 1645 actually understands that the workers are here to stay, adn that they contribute to the economy and to the society.

Still long way to see any real improvement in the immigration process in this country, but this program would actually alleviate the situation of many workers and companies.

And remember, all these immigrants actually leave a lot of money in taxes and social security payments which they never receive back.

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May 27, 2004

Longevous immigrants

Immigrants outlive the poor US born, according to the Star Telegram: of course, it is surprising to see that despite the lack of access to proper medical care, and very poor living conditions and long working hours, a healthier lifestyle brings those significant differences:

"People have a misconception that immigrants have poorer health, but when you look at the empirical data ... you almost always find they do better than their U.S.-born counterparts," Singh said. His research reported that immigrants' life expectancy surpassed 78 years, while the U.S.-born population's life expectancy hovered at 75. Current U.S. life expectancy is more than 77 years.

Besides, it is hard to argue about longevity when you know that the person sitting next to you has a positive outlook in life - you need that just to think about living in this country.

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War on immigrants

Jus tin time to implement their other strategy, comes a new warning from the Attorney General saying that, at some point, Al Qaeda maybe attacking the USA, and then they proceed to clarify what faces are going to be profiled next:

Government sources have said in the past that El Shukrijumah, born in Saudi Arabia, is believed to be a Yemeni. He has family in Guyana and is believed to have a passport from that South American nation, the sources said. He uses several aliases and also may have other passports, they said.
The sources described him as a field organizer and strategic planner for al Qaeda.
They also said he spent time in Florida.

It seems clear that once the furor and rage over racial profiling of middle easterners subsided, it was time to attack the other unwanted immigrants, so now Ashcroft is warning about people that travel with families and have passports from South America.

Only that there are 30 million of those foreigners in this country. They are Latinos!

Ashcroft is a jingoistic xenophobic buffoon, and his pronouncements are sad and worrying.

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February 24, 2004

Modern slavery

Salon comes again with an article on Bush's immigration proposal, a plan that sounds as cheap labor for corporate interests that are Bush only concern:

It is less the legalization of laborers than the organization and control of the labor supply, less an employee benefit than an employer advantage, less an expansion of workers' rights than a major economic concession to big business. A U.S. Border Patrol chaplain has called it "the closest thing to modern slavery our country has known."

But on the same article, Sally Denton points to Alan Greenspan when she throws a surprise statistic: immigrants contribute more than US$27 billion to the economy each year. Immigrants, whether legal or illegal, pay taxes and Social Security, only that when they unemployed they have no unemployment checks, and when the inhumane conditions in which they work finally render them sick they will not receive any treatment. If they leave the country, they lose all their contributions to Social Security. If they are fired or harassed, there is almost no recourse.
And yet people believe in the image of the freeloading immigrant.
These are your new slaves, America! Wake up and feel ashamed!

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January 12, 2004

Immigration reform

The one thing I like about Bush's immigration proposal is that it has elicited an incredible amount of skepticism in organizations that work for immigrant and refugees rights, and at the same time has annoyed the right, as I found at craigslist:

Michael Savage said on his radio show tonight: Don't vote for Bush in the next election, because of his selling out to illegal immigrants.

Actually, it has surprised everyone: yahoo, cnn, reuters, the Miami herald, the SFO chronicle, the Guardian, the voice of America, wired, the LA Times, the NY journal, the mercury, and again the mercury; But please remember that it all started with some remarks from Tom Ridge, that incredibly alienated this right wing group, as well as this people, and gave hope to the people in NYcity; it made it to Salon and all!
Let's get real: This proposal was (past tense) simply part of the security measures contemplated as a result of the attacks on 9/11, a clear and logic extension of the need to have immigrants identified and accounted for: if, for some reason, the radical Muslims were to hide among the Latino community, it would have been almost impossible to root them out.

The undocumented Latino community is a gigantic subculture that lives completely outside the realm of the bureaucratic American apparatus: they are denied bank accounts, drivers licenses, and social security; they all pay taxes AND contribute to Social Security (these are automatically deducted from the paychecks), their work contracts, lease and car loans are, for the most part, agreements that occur with the least of documentation possible; there is permanent and amazingly cheap underground market for fake papers, good enough to get work; justice is usually denied, basically because there are no translators, and even medicine and health is a thing that only a few can enjoy. They are ghosts.

So obviously, again, Tom Ridge sees this, and proposes the national ID for immigrants (coming later to all citizens), and in the process, recognizing them and granting them their basic civil rights! Of course the right-wing groups are angry at this! imagine that eight million people, suddenly demanding to be respected and treated like human beings! What it would be to be paid more than the minimum wage for doing dangerous work! Imagine that, after decades of pouring billions of dollars into the bankrupt American Social Security system, they are actually getting what they are paying for! Imagine sending their kids to school, and having them actually learning instead of sitting in a corner because their teachers can easily dismiss the children of undocumented immigrants!

It all boils down to one thing: Granting them ID will lead to the recognition of more than eight million people as that, as people, with rights and voice and responsibilities as well.

How many will go the route of registering, if it ever becomes an option, and how many decide to remain hiding, is crucial to the effectiveness of Ridge's and Bush's proposals: right now, the undocumented immigrants can remain under the radar, and when their employer finally decides to get rid of them, and it will happen, they can simply move on to the next low paying job. If they register, it will mean that, after three years of creating a life here, they would have to leave. Not a happy prospect. Instead, and what many organizations are asking for, is a true register by which they are granted the possibility of applying for residentship, and the absolute and clear imperative to add to those proposals a way to reunite families and to recognize that many of these immigrants have been living for many years here. It is not so much that they don't want to go, it is that they cannot go! Where to? To what? Their lives are here, their children are here, their social network is here.

Failure to recognize the rights of people, even though they are aliens, will mean that this country will continue its long run in becoming a mirror image of its old enemies, having a second class population, a disposable one that has existence only for three years.

The United States can benefit immensely from acknowledging those immigrants, and by granting them rights and voices incorporating them into the mainstream, not only for national security reasons, but because in doing so these communities will surely revitalize, energize and give an impulse to a country that is in dire need of accepting that its strength come from its diversity.

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November 28, 2003

North Carolina and immigrants

Found, via Ed Cone, some comments about the poll that the N&O had about the immigrant population here in North Carolina. Elros, at Carolina Progressive, checks on the credentials of some "group that support immigration curbs", and not so surprisingly, finds it allied with groups previously identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups.
Furthermore, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Jack Pinnix, takes issue with the wording of the poll, which clearly suggests a response by describing immigrants as ?illegal?.
But with the exposure I have had to immigrants, the only clear thing is that North Carolina benefits greatly from our presence: not only in cheap and reliable labor, but also in adding diversity and contributing to the economy and political development of this state. Of course, in hard economic times, when jobs are scarce and there is uncertainty about stability, it is easy to blame foreigners and seek only the comfort of what is known, but much more dangerous is the continuous transfer of jobs to other countries, and the increasing deficit in trade, than a few jobs here in a couple of chicken plants.

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October 13, 2003

At the border

This very sad tale of Hughes and Beate has relevance only because it happens to a DHS and his fiancée. But, come, on, boys and girls, it happens all the time!
Back when it was INS< they would detain anybody, based on whatever criteria they apply, interrogate without recourse to lawyers or outside contact, and finally made the detainee sign a document waiving their right to a trial and accepting that they tried to enter the country illegally or with illegal purposes. Basically, they were forced (tortured?) to confess to something that was only in the immigration's official mind.
am not making this up. This happened to friends, acquaintances, family. This has been going on fro years, and nobody does anything nor does anybody care.
Unless, of course, she happens to be the fiancée of a former DHS agent.

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September 5, 2003

NIRR

The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights is issugin a report on DHS and its effect on immigrants and refugees:

Human Rights & Human Security At Risk demonstrates that since immigration enforcement and services were placed within the new Department of Homeland Security just six months ago, abusive and discriminatory immigration enforcement has become even more entrenched, seriously jeopardizing community safety and compromising access to services. Immigration policies and practices that have been prone to abuse and human rights violations may now be even more difficult to reform or to establish government accountability within a structure that cements immigration policies to a war against terrorism. Immigrant communities, families and neighborhoods will likely find little or no relief from the mounting discrimination and abuse as a result of these profound changes, as DHS consolidates the management and jurisdiction of immigration matters.

Some people are feeling the failure of the American system sooner than others.

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July 17, 2003

Deportees

Showing how the INS has souped up their enfoircing policies, and basically denied the immigrants their rights to counsel and representation, this article about deportees and the plight of illegal workers to arrive here in the USA.
The option is clear: starve in their country, making 1.20 at hour working for an American corporation, or come here to the USA, and make 5.75 an hour - much better possibilities, and a little future in the horizon.

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February 11, 2003

Hispanics left behind

Hispanics are being left behind at an alarming rate: Only 16% Hispanic high schools students are likely to attend college.

Hispanic students are more likely to go to college part time than non-Hispanic blacks or whites. They are also more likely to attend community colleges, lured by cheaper tuition, more flexible schedules to accommodate outside jobs, and courses in fields like computer science and nursing, which offer a quicker path to a paycheck.

I once had to help some Hispanic kids at their school, and what I saw depressed me: The teachers would simply move the kids along with the rest of the class, but without paying attention to any particular developmental need, issues with parents, poor health, learning disabilities or the like: The children were attending school just because the law requires it, not because they were to derive any benefit from that.
And after a year, they were someone else’s problem.

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January 31, 2003

On the cover


I fail to see how this might be funny.
The Onion:Migrant Worker Family Thrilled To See Selves On Cover Of The Economist

SAN CARLOS, TX?A family of Mexican migrant workers was thrilled to find its picture on the cover of the Jan. 25 issue of The Economist, vegetable farmhand, factory laborer, and fruit picker Luis Moreno reported Monday.

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December 27, 2002

The race issue

About the race issue:
The thing with race is that Latinos are being forced around here to “adopt” a race, so as better to fit into the usual black-white scheme of things. At the DMV we are asked race, at the INS when filing papers, at the Census – everywhere people are being confronted with that artificial segregation.
Worse, both black and white communities take umbrage in seeing a Latino going out of their “place” (at least here) and oh so shocking, I have been told twice that I am neither white enough nor black enough to go out on a date.
So, it is an issue. My father has blond hair and green ayes, and my mother had dark brown eyes, and that Latina complexion: Upon arriving here, I became “White”. No, thanks, I do have unique racial and cultural identity.
The Latinamerican mentality is different and much more varied than commonly understood, even by Latinos themselves. Nineteen nationalities, countless regions, a multitude of different ethnic origins and a thorough mixing makes the culture of the Latinos a melting pot much more complicated than that of the USA.

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September 20, 2002

Iglesias gone Wild

MUSIC

This is another fine example of marketing gone wild: Latin Grammys.

But I would rather go to the show in Miami that the one in LA. Too much politics in Florida, true, but still the Latin music community is much more prevalent there.

It surprises me that Iglesias and Sanz are being Latinos. If you go to Spain, you will be immediately termed “sudaca”, derisive for South American, and never would the haughty Spaniards accept being grouped with Mexicans, Cubans and others. Yet at the Grammys, Enrique Iglesias and Alejandro Sanz are big winners, of course, as long as they identify themselves as “Latino$”.

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May 13, 2002

Dervala's blog,

I am reading Dervala's blog, where she talks about skydiving. Ahhh.

Also, I am reading (a book, remember?): In Cuba I was a German Shepherd. If you are American, you laugh. If you immigrated a long time ago, you feel a deep, old sadness. If you have just a little time here, you cry, and hope that it gets better.
You know it won't.

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