7-21-05, 12:24 am
In a disgusting display of what the Republican Party is really all about, two GOP Senators introduced a bill that would force undocumented immigrants to leave the country in five years.
The provision, introduced Tuesday by Republican Sens. John Kyl of Arizona and John Cornyn of Texas, would create a massive new bureaucracy at the Social Security Administration to ensure that every worker in the US has a Social Security number and would increase militarization of a supposedly 'free border' by adding 11,000 agents to the Department of Homeland Security’s massive border police force.
The bill would spend an additional $2.5 billion to install surveillance equipment, walls and fences, and other sensory devices along the border with Mexico.
The new army of agents and bureaucrats would be empowered sweep the US workforce and its workplaces to find, detain, and punish the estimated 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants currently working in the US.
The bill makes no provisions for allowing undocumented workers any avenues for attaining citizenship or legal residency.
Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), who introduced another immigration bill two months ago that would address the immigration issue by providing immigrant workers with time to attain legal residency and/or citizenship as well as preventing massive unemployment and homelessness by allowing them to keep their jobs.
Kennedy criticized the Kyl/Cornyn bill as unrealistic. Kennedy told the media, 'The mass deportation of illegal immigrant persons as contemplated by the Cornyn-Kyl bill is not a realistic solution, and won’t solve the security and economic problems we face.'
Kyl and Cornyn, pandering to anti-immigrant sentiment fueled by the far-right extremists in their states, want to create a massive new government surveillance arm to round up undesirables and deport them. This dangerous proposal should be rejected for what it is: a racist, hateful, anti-working class bill.
It is specifically meant to appeal to ultra right extremists as the 2006 election approaches. It shows that the Republican Party has no ideas for building a united country, turning back the tide of economic stagnation and other social problems, or serious and effective strategies for security. The only ideas they have are how to divide people, promote hate, and push a bad corporate agenda. In place of international collective security, they want to turn inward and lash out at the people who have built up our country from its origins.
A meaningful and realistic immigration policy is an amnesty policy. Provision of amnesty for undocumented workers would allow them to acquire legal status, residency and eventually citizenship if they desire. It doesn’t require thousands of agents combing through the files of businesses or infiltrating workplaces to weed out the undocumented persons.
What is at stake? Many people complain that in a time of slow job growth, adding undocumented workers to the workforce tightens the job market and drives down wages.
The problem with mass deportations 'solution' is that it relies on viewing undocumented workers as unworthy human beings who do not have rights guaranteed in the US Constitution to all 'persons' in the US.
Second, it ignores the basic facts about the immigration situation. Corporations rely on undocumented workers to fill low wage jobs. Corporations get around immigration restrictions by simply flouting existing restrictive laws.
Why do they do this? First, corporations share the view that immigrants do not have to be treated equally. So they pay low wages, withhold benefits, and are prone to abuse undocumented employees, etc.
Secondly, they use the status of undocumented workers against them. 'If you complain or try to organize unions,' they tell their workers, 'we will report you.'
Such was the case at a Utah factory where the employers knowingly had hire dozens of undocumented workers. When the workers grew tired of poor treatment and began to organize a union, seeing it as the only way to change their situation, the employer called the (then) Immigration and Naturalization Service who promptly raided and detained the workers attempting to organize. In other words, the employer used the immigration police to stop a union at the plant.
Third, employers use undocumented workers purposely to replace union workers or higher paid documented workers. The point is to lower the living standard for all workers, but it is also to ensure animosity and division – divide and conquer.
As long as immigration policy promotes 'illegality' of some workers and as long as non-immigrant and documented workers buy into hating undocumented workers, corporations will always be able to use their anger as a sledge hammer to beat all workers into submission and into accepting a lower standard of living. This is the real purpose of the Kyl/Cornyn bill, and ones like it.
People who support an immigration policy being proposed by Kyl and Cornyn have fallen for the trick; they have been duped.
It is time to reject the politics of division and paranoid surveillance, the hallmark of the Republican Party’s legacy, and adopt a policy of unity and cooperation. If no one section of the workforce can be used against another because all workers stand together, workers can use their unity to make gains in pay, benefits, and political power.
