After all my bluster about refusing to listen to debates, I went ahead
and listened to Elizabeth Warren today. She's okay. I'll vote for
her...maybe, although with the congress and the federal judges and the
makeup of the Supreme Court, she may wind up being another Obama.
It's a year away from election, so lots can happen. And I don't
really know her foreign policies.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/9/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Bernie Sanders's New Immigration Proposal Is Incredibly Strong
By Daniel Denvir, Jacobin
09 November 19
With the release of his immigration plan yesterday, Bernie Sanders has set
the bar on a just and humane immigration, border, and labor policy agenda -
and made it clear that immigrants are central to a united, insurgent
American working class.
Bernie Sanders released his immigration plan yesterday. It's a plan that
rejects and redresses the entirety of Trump's xenophobic agenda, then goes
far beyond that to radically break with the decades-long bipartisan war on
immigrants that made Trump possible.
Sanders without question now sets the bar on immigration, border, and labor
policy, and he has made it clear that immigrants are central to an
insurgent
American working class and that the working class must be united to win.
"Democrats risk losing the election unless and until they can articulate
and
advance a unifying agenda that raises wages and conditions for ALL workers
across race, gender, class, and, importantly, nationality," National Day
Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) director Pablo Alvarado said in a
statement responding to Sanders's plan. "The deep divisions caused by the
exploitation of immigrant work was the dry timber on which Trump poured his
racist kerosene, and the populist fire that is now raging as the result of
this arson can only be extinguished when Democrats confront, head on, the
centrality of work and workers' rights within the debate about the future
of
US immigration policy."
Sanders's immigration plan is dedicated to immigrant freedom. It contains
no
talk of border security or targeting "criminal aliens." He rejects the
establishment's comprehensive immigration-reform model that has traded
draconian enforcement as a putative down payment to buy Republican
congressional support for a mass legalization of undocumented immigrants.
In
other words, Bernie's plan identifies presidents George W. Bush and Barack
Obama's strategies as a failure.
As the proposal makes clear, the problem with this approach for the last
twenty years is that the more anti-immigrant measures were offered and
implemented, the more hostile Republicans grew to legalization. Bernie, the
plan states:
will not accept delays from Congress, and will not trade limitless and
unaccountable funding for border militarization, detention beds, and
deportation forces for a deal that has yet to materialize. Bernie will use
the constitutional authority vested in the president to take bold and
necessary executive action if Congress fails to enact the commonsense
immigration reforms supported by the vast majority of Americans.
He promises an immediate moratorium on deportations and pledges to use
strong executive action to ensure that a large proportion of undocumented
Americans will not be banished from their homes. His fight to win
legislation to grant them citizenship will be a fight for legalization as a
stand-alone cause, rejecting additional immigration enforcement to woo the
Right into backing a compromise they will never accept.
For decades, establishment politicians have deported millions and built
hundreds of miles of fencing on the border with Mexico in a quixotic effort
to convince Republicans that they are serious about "border security." This
strategy has not only implemented right-wing nativist policy in exchange
for
nothing, but ratified nativist rhetoric portraying immigrants as threats
and
the border as insecure. Bernie is right to reject it.
Sanders pledges to increase the number of refugee admissions, including a
new climate refugee program to welcome those fleeing the unfolding global
environmental disaster that American capitalism has played the lead role in
creating. Sanders also proposes greater opportunities for legal immigration
by increasing the number of visas based on the principle of family
reunification rather than US corporations' dictates.
Sanders recognizes that US foreign and economic policy - including climate
change - is complicit in fomenting migration from Central America, and that
we must remake the global economy and deliver economic justice so that
people are free to not migrate and stay put if they choose.
In the 1980s, Sanders was a vociferous critic of murderous US intervention
against left-wing revolutionaries in Central America. His immigration
proposal stays true to that solidarity by recognizing that our deep
complicity in making the region unlivable for so many imposes an ethical
obligation on us to welcome immigrants and refugees. Bernie's immigration
plan, like his foreign policy, is refreshingly internationalist, calling to
"end global inequality and the international race to the bottom so that no
human being needs to migrate for survival."
Sanders calls for radically decriminalizing immigration and breaking the
bonds that Democratic and Republican leaders have forged between
immigration
enforcement and mass incarceration. As the plan rightly notes: "The
criminalization of immigrants has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars,
dehumanized vulnerable migrants, and swelled already-overcrowded jails and
prisons."
He wants to decriminalize unauthorized border crossings, repealing the
statute that Trump has used to separate families. But he won't wait on
Congress to change border policy. Sanders pledges to take executive action
to end the systematic prosecution of immigrants for the federal misdemeanor
of illegal entry that has been commonplace since the Bush administration.
He
also wants to end programs that have turned the country's police, jails,
and
prisons into the entryway to a massive deportation pipeline, including
287(g), Secure Communities, and the Criminal Alien Program. These programs
have simultaneously fueled deportations and mass incarceration. Ending them
would curb both.
Specifically, Sanders calls for the repeal of historic anti-immigrant
measures signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 that have made
deportations incredibly tough to fight, required mandatory detention for
many immigration offenders, barred deportees from lawfully entering for
three to ten years, and expanded the number of crimes that subject
non-citizens to all but certain deportation. He also calls for checks on
the
Border Patrol's police-state powers to question and search people with
impunity throughout large swathes of this country.
The criminalization of immigration enforcement - the rise of what activists
and scholars call "crimmigration" - has not only been disastrous policy but
dangerous politics as well. For decades, politicians including Clinton,
Bush, and Obama engaged in rhetoric and implemented policies that portrayed
immigrants as a criminal threat. In doing so, they created the political
template for Trump to demonize immigrants as just that.
The president infamously announced his campaign in 2015 by declaring that
Mexican immigrants are "bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're
rapists." It was not just the far right but also excruciatingly ordinary
bipartisan politics that linked immigration to the war on crime and so gave
Trump this language and made it resonate.
Sanders is also clear that making immigration into a national security
issue
after the September 11 attacks was a disaster, and that "immigration is not
a threat to national security." He calls for breaking up the Department of
Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs
and Border Protection, restructuring and thus taming the enforcement
machine.
The integration of immigration enforcement into the War on Terror national
security state has turbocharged funding for enforcement while portraying
immigrants - particularly Muslims - as a terrorist threat. This is another
issue where establishment leaders from both major parties helped create the
demonized caricature of the immigrant other that Trump would exploit and
take to a new and dangerous level.
Sanders challenges nativist rhetoric that portrays immigrants as a threat
to
taxpayers through the use of public benefits and to jobs by driving down
wages. Since California voters passed Proposition 187 in 1994, the
depiction
of immigrants as an economic danger has been critical to the power of
anti-immigrant politics. But immigrants are far from the only people who
have been harmed: the use of racist scapegoating has served to undermine
the
welfare state for everyone and to divide workers against one another.
Critically, Sanders's core universal programs are truly universal: Medicare
for All and College for All are for all regardless of immigration status.
Sanders's proposal makes clear that immigrants are fellow workers and
pledges that his administration would prioritize enforcement of immigrant
worker labor rights over immigration enforcement. One way he pledges to do
that is by protecting undocumented workers who report labor violations from
deportation, a measure long pushed for by NDLON. Allowing immigrants to
receive legal status when they blow the whistle on workplace abuse wields
the law to erode the very two-tier labor market that the persecution of
undocumented immigrants has created.
The politics of this immigration policy agenda are important: by
emphasizing
that immigrants are core to the working class rather than a threat to it,
Sanders strengthens the multiracial coalition that is this country's only
hope for transformative change. Sanders had deep support among Latinos
before releasing the immigration plan, and he is counting on their massive
turnout to win.
"The issues that we are talking about appeal to the Latino community and
young people in general, and that is a lot of Latinos are working for
starvation wages - they want to see that minimum wage raised," Sanders
recently told Politico. "I'm the son of an immigrant myself, my father came
from Poland without any money. I think I know a little bit about the
experience."
Latinos support Sanders for the same reason everyone else does. They
support
his working-class agenda - a universal agenda of which this immigration
plan
now forms an important part.
Bernie has a good record on immigration and consistently voted against the
sort of draconian enforcement and border militarization bills embraced by
many establishment Democrats. But he has also described immigration in
troublingly nationalist terms in the past. This plan shows that Bernie has
come to understand that bosses and government repression of immigrants, and
not immigrant workers, are what undermine labor standards.
People say that Bernie never changes his mind. That's not entirely true.
It's just that when he does, he moves in the right direction.
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