Immigrant families still being torn apart

[kmd]

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I've signed the pledge and donated but health keeps me from fasting.

Immigration law in this country has always been a bellweather of racism and foreign policy. We welcomed political asylees from Russia with open arms, from El Salvador and Nicaragua not so much.

When the Immigration and Naturalization Service was moved from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security, that was a seismic shift in the character of the U.S. In that one move, our government reframed immigrants from individuals applying for legal benefits for which they may be eligible ... to threats to the country who are assumed to be hostile to our security until they prove otherwise.

This immigration "crisis" is of our own making. The laws passed in the last 20 years have progressively made it hard, harder, impossible for immigrants to pursue legal status. The fact that our family reunification laws make it so that we are entering a time when immigration will every year make the U.S. browner is NOT a coincidence to the supposed "immigration crisis." Our laws have *created* a permanent underclass. And now Bush and FAIR and others claim that the number of undocumented workers is somehow the result of a mass influx. No, it is the result of your changes in the law, permanently excluding millions of people who previously would have been eligible for changing to legal status.

I worked as an immigration paralegal for over 10 years, from 1988 to 1998. I saw firsthand the insanely racist implementation of U.S. immigration laws. And the disproportionate effect on women and children.

The way immigration issues get reported in the mainstream media is always agonizing. Never do they look back and analyze whether and how changes in the law have brought the mess we're in. They always assume that the rise in undocumented workers represents an increase in the number of people who come every year. Lou Dobbs does not operate in a vacuum.

I'm grateful these folks are lighting a fire under the rest of us.

(heads-up via brownfemipower)