Search Results for "poverty"
Ted Kennedy, Champion of Immigrant Rights
Published August 26, 2009 @ 04:44AM PT
For decades, Senator Ted Kennedy fought in the halls of Congress on behalf of immigrants and their families. You can see the history of his involvement with leaders like Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez in the photos at the website of the United Farmworkers, which today mourns his passing.
Some Congress watchers may wonder how immigration reform can succeed without Kennedy working to push it through the legislative process. I think he would find fault with that sentiment and encourage us to continue to fight.
Update: Many of my change.org co-bloggers were also inspired by the work of Senator Kennedy. Here are the results by topic:
Animal Rights
Gay Rights
Genocide
Global Health
Global Warming
Health Care
Homelessness
Humanitarian Relief
Social Entrepreneurship
US Poverty
Women's Rights
Institutional Support for Torture Undermines Government's Legitimacy
Published August 25, 2009 @ 08:05PM PT
In case my last post was a little too patriotic for some jaded, worldwise visitors to the blog, I received something upsetting in my inbox today. It was a description from Amnesty International of the ways the U.S. government tortured many innocent men over the past several years, and sometimes children.
I studied human rights in law school. I felt upset and outraged reading Andrew Sullivan's consistent writing on torture back in 2004-05 (I'm sure he wasn't the first). I have represented asylum-seekers, some of whom had experienced unimaginable misery, in the U.S. asylum system for the past three or four years.
But after all this, I only recently came to understand in a deep, personal way the true destructive, dehumanizing impact of torture. Torture takes a person and erases that person. I don't know that I believe in good and evil, but seeing the effects of torture up close is the closest glimpse of evil that I have ever had. I did not until recently understand what torture "meant" in a moral or practical sense.
Reaching that realization and then remembering that the government to which I send part of my income every year to spend on "national defense" has used some of that money to torture human beings is a disturbing place for anyone to arrive. I had thought before that I was distrustful of my government, I had even felt betrayed as I watched events unfold over the last several years. Now thinking about that government and the national community which gives it its raison d'etre, I feel only deadness. I don't know how to reconcile that with the inspiration I have felt watching the nascent Dream movement coalesce.
Read about Mohammed Jawad, a teenager we locked up at Guantánamo and beat, tortured, and denied access to the legal system. We told him his family would be killed if he did not confess. After his case went up to the Supreme Court, he was finally released and went home.
It looks like the system worked after all!
Ask President Obama and members of Congress to take action to ensure this doesn't happen again and that those responsible for torturing in the name of the greater good are held accountable.
</call to righteous action>
<meditative diversion>
I've had a song stuck in my head lately: Bad Religion's "Sorrow." Here's a low-key acoustic version with some horrific imagery that you should not show your children and maybe not yourself.
This is how systems work. These are the results of a well-functioning system:
Below the fold, do you take Bad Religion's song "Sorrow" at face value or not?
Reduce Poverty in America: Pass the Dream Act
Published April 12, 2009 @ 08:00PM PT
DREAMer Piash writes about the DREAM Act today on change.org's Poverty in America blog, cross-posted here.
In August 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau released 2007 data on poverty, incomes and health insurance coverage. The poverty rate in 2007 was 12.5 percent as in 37.3 million people. According to the Census the number of people living in poverty was up about 800,000 (36.5 million in 2006, 37.3 million in 2007).
A person earning less than $10,400 in 2008 is considered to be living in poverty. Since undocumented immigrants and their children often work in low wage jobs, have no health insurance, and live in overcrowded apartments, they are most certainly living in poverty. Contrary to the popular myth, undocumented immigrants do not qualify for welfare. As the Congressional Research Service points out in a 2007 report, undocumented immigrants, who comprise nearly one-third of all immigrants in the country, are not eligible to receive public "welfare" benefits. Yet these undocumented workers pay $7 billion per year to the Social Security Administration even though they will not be eligible for any of the benefits.
As an undocumented immigrant student, I now know firsthand how poverty can affect low-income families. But this was not always the case.
Poverty and the Politics of Blame
Published February 05, 2009 @ 08:39PM PT
Check out Leigh's post today at the change.org Poverty in America blog about immigration, poverty, and blame:
First, if you wish to blame our nation's problems of poverty and inequality on immigrants, particularly undocumented workers, I suggest you educate yourself on immigration and the real causes behind poverty and inequality in the U.S. before you look around for a scapegoat. I will try to devote some posts to this issue in the future, but keep in mind that our economic and social policies of the last thirty years have favored the very wealthy and corporations at the expense of the American worker. As economist Jared Bernstein wrote in an economic analysis of 2000 poverty and immigration data:
immigration’s role appears to have been overstated at the expense of other, more fundamentally economic factors [influencing the economic trends of the 1990s]. Both New York and California, for example, saw larger than average increases in inequality over the decade, and the incomes of the wealthy pulled far ahead of those at the middle and the bottom of the income scale. In many States, the increase in inequality meant that the growth that did occur went disproportionately to those at the top of the income scale, leaving those at the lower end more vulnerable to poverty, regardless of their status as natives or immigrants.
Now, maybe you're like my low-wage uncle whose employer has slowly fired most of his native born workers and replaced them with Brazilian immigrants, many undocumented. Maybe you feel like your (already under-the-table) wages are suffering as a result. Why then, do you blame your co-workers, who still earn less than you and are struggling as much if not more than you, and not your employer who breaks the law and takes advantage of all his/her working poor employees? When we look around us, it is much easier to turn on one another than channel our anger at behind-the-scenes, hostile, anti-worker, corporatist policies. And there's always a group to blame: immigrants, African-Americans, the poor, women, etc. It's intolerable and completely at odds with the work we need to do to reduce poverty.
There's more, and good stuff in comments, too. I'm constantly impressed by my co-bloggers' commitment and knowledge. If you feel inspired, drop by Leigh's place and share your story.
Blog Action Day: Fight Poverty
Published October 15, 2008 @ 05:39AM PT
Today on Blog Action Day, take a moment to learn about about the Millenium Development Goals and where we stand on reaching the 2015 targets. From the Blog Action Day website:
Today thousands of bloggers will unite to discuss a single issue - poverty. We aim to raise awareness, initiate action and to shake the web!
You can make a difference, too: Donate here to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
Update: Check out XicanoPwr's excellent Blog Action Day post on domestic poverty, immigration, and the Latin@ community.
SPLC Reports Latinos Under Siege in Southern States
Published April 21, 2009 @ 09:37PM PT
The Southern Poverty Law Center released a report today detailing the systemic discrimination and exploitation Latin@ migrants face today in the South.
In Tennessee, a young mother is arrested and jailed when she asks to be paid for her work in a cheese factory.
In Alabama, a migrant bean picker sees his life savings confiscated by police during a traffic stop.
In Georgia, a rapist goes unpunished because his 13-year-old victim is undocumented.
. . .
[Latin@s] are routinely cheated out of their earnings and denied basic health and safety protections. They are regularly subjected to racial profiling and harassment by law enforcement. They are victimized by criminals who know they are reluctant to report attacks. And they are frequently forced to prove themselves innocent of immigration violations, regardless of their legal status.
Roberto Lovato has dubbed this phenomenon Juan Crow, highlighting the similarities of this system to the previous network of social norms, law enforcement priorities, and economic abuses that kept Southern blacks poor and powerless under the Jim Crow regime of official disenfranchisement.
For this report, Southern Poverty Law Center researchers surveyed 500 low-income Latinos - including legal residents, undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens - at five locations in the South to take the pulse of a community that is being increasingly driven into the shadows by a sweeping anti-immigration movement.
We found a population under siege and living in fear - fear of the police, fear of the government and fear of criminals who prey on immigrants because of their vulnerability.
This mirrors my experiences representing undocumented migrants in two of the most migrant-friendly cities in the country: New York City and Philadelphia. I would not want to be undocumented in Alabama or Tennessee.
There's more on the SPLC report from Immigration Impact.
Anti-immigrant Movement Hamstrung By Members
Published June 20, 2009 @ 12:46PM PT
The fragmentation of the Minuteman movement and proliferation of splinter groups even as popular support for the organization wanes demonstrates the untenability of a modern mass movement in the U.S. based on fear and racism. Minuteman founders Jim Gilchrist and Chris Simcox had barely organized the movement before their acrimonious split, and it has been downhill for the Minutemen ever since.
Dee from Immigration Talk has been publishing emails (first and second) from a disenchanted Minuteman, which tell of chronic infighting, romantic intrigue, intra-group defamation lawsuits, and staged video shootings of immigrants.
This is not a stable movement.
This is all to say that Shawna Forde is not an aberration in a group like this. Dave Neiwert and the SPLC were pointing out the connections between the Minutemen and white power groups back in 2005:
The day after the Minuteman rally in Naco, the two Alliance members there -- one of whom identified himself as "Sam Adams" -- were assigned to an observation post about a mile from McCutchen's location. They arrived there after a 10-minute "training session," driving to the post as they blasted white power music.
"We understand why Gilchrist and [project co-organizer Chris] Simcox have to talk all this P.C., crap," said one. "It's all about playing to the media. That's fine. While we're here, it's their game and we'll play by their rules. Once Minuteman's over, though, we might just have to come back and do our own thing."
And the media bought it without much scrutiny. Now anti-immigrant leaders are shocked--shocked!--that someone like Shawna Forde had slipped into these groups through deception. Back in 2005:
The presence of [neo-Nazi National Alliance] members was not much of a surprise, and there were likely more than that pair. "We're not going to show up as a group and say, 'Hi, we're the National Alliance," Alliance official Shaun Walker told a reporter in the run-up to the protest. "But we have members ... that will participate."
Repeated claims by leaders of the anti-immigrant movement that they have nothing to do with anti-Latin@ and white power groups are continually undermined by the grassroots participation in the movement by members of those groups.
[Images: SPLC]
