On September 15, 2010, life as Shing Ma “Steve” Li knew it ended suddenly. On that warm summer morning about a month and half ago, two men knocked on the door of his San Francisco apartment. Inside, 20-year-old Steve was getting ready for a full day of classes at the City College of San Francisco. He could not have imagined that within the next couple hours he would be arrested and detained as a fugitive criminal. In the ensuing two days, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) processed Steve and his mother and sent them to their detention facility in Sacramento. Several weeks later, he was moved to the ICE detention center in Florence, Arizona, where he now awaits deportation.

Steve had no idea of his family’s status. Though he was born in Lima, Peru on July 3, 1990, Steve grew up right here in San Francisco. He attended Francisco Middle School and graduated from George Washington High School in 2008. Of ethnic Chinese dissent, Steve’s family arrived in San Francisco in 2002 after escaping from hardships in Peru. His parents came to America hoping for a fresh start. Steve was currently enrolled at the City College of San Francisco and was preparing to transfer to San Francisco State University where he planned on studying to become a nurse.

Sadly, Steve could have been spared this awful situation if Congress had passed the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, also known as the DREAM Act. This bill provides relief for certain inadmissible or deportable alien students who arrived in the U.S. as children, who graduate from US high schools, who are of good moral character, and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill's enactment. Qualifying students have the opportunity to earn conditional permanent residency if they complete two years in the military or two years of schooling at a four-year institution of higher learning.

The DREAM Act will get another vote later this year, as an amendment to the National Defense Reauthorization Act. The DREAM Act has bipartisan co-sponsors, and majority of the Senate has voted for it in the past. We hope and pray that Congress will pass the DREAM Act this year.

I was Steve’s professor at City College of San Francisco, and along with Steve’s other teachers and friends, we are writing to everyone we know to publicize Steve’s unjust detention, to educate people about the DREAM Act, and to try to forestall Steve’s deportation in the hope that the DREAM Act will be passed through Congress this year.   Read More »

Frankly, you all are missing the real issue. Being a woman of color I have experienced racial injustice and racial discrimination my entire life. Enough to know that racial profiling is NEVER EVER okay! And now they think that they can just slip it into law?!?!? This is not about us supporting immigrants being illegal or supporting illegals crossing the border without the appropriate paperwork. Its about the millions of Mexican Americans who are citizens. Born and raised here just like you, who will now legally be profiled, apprehended, harassed, discriminated against, and automatically assumed to be illegal. That is not right and that is not civil! So thank you Rev. Al Sharpton for inflamming the true issue when so many others are blind, because if this law goes into effect, honestly, WHO IS NEXT?
That's the problem with white politicians. They think that if a law protect the rights of white Americans than it protects the rights of all Americans and that is not the case! As for President Obama I feel that by him not intervening he is condoning. President Obama we voted for you because you represented CHANGE so please don't be afraid to do just that!

In the wake of the Arizona immigration law being signed by their governor, California Republican and US Senate candidate Tom Campbell was quick to announce his support for the law, putting him significantly out of step with public opinion in California and indicating a willingness to let his fellow Californians be subjected to unfair violations of their civil liberties and random searches based on racial profiling.

So the Courage Campaign decided to let Tom Campbell know that Californians didn't agree with his stance. We joined Rev. Eric Lee of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the California of Federation of Teachers to ask our members to sign a letter to Campbell asking him to withdraw his support for the Arizona law and pledge to not bring such a law to California.

Just a few hours after we deployed our email, Campbell responded directly to us via email:

Had you contacted me, I would have urged you not to fan the flames of this controversy, as you have chosen to do. Your language is inflammatory in the highest degree.

We are all bound by the same federal laws. No state or city has the right to exclude itself from the application of federal law. And if a state wishes to ask its law enforcement agents to help enforce federal law, I don't see how we can object. After all, the federal government has done a terrible job of enforcing the laws against illegal immigration.

Under Arizona's law, and under the Constitution as interpreted by Chief Justice Earl Warren in Terry v. Ohio, in 1968, police officers have the right to ask individuals when they have reasonable grounds for suspicion of a law violation. Racial profiling does not constitute reasonable grounds. That was always clear in the new law; but changes adopted yesterday by Arizona make it even more clear. Another change makes even clearer the intent of the original law, that the stop must be for violation of other laws, such as a moving violation in traffic.

Californians, especially, ought to watch the experience of our neighbor state before rushing to condemn it. Like Arizona, California, too, has been burdened by the federal government's unwillingness to enforce existing laws, and our nation's sovereignty. "Sanctuary cities," setting themselves up as immune to federal law, are no more legal than the efforts of "nullification" of federal law tried by southern states before our country's civil war. And when the federal government fails to enforce the law, it is us, the citizens of the border states, who pay the price. We ought to be free, therefore, to take steps to assist federal enforcement of our nation's sovereignty, and its borders.

There's a lot of problematic and flawed arguments here, as Rick Jacobs, Chair of the Courage Campaign, Rev. Eric Lee, and Kenneth Burt, Political Director of the CFT explained in their response letter emailed to Campbell this afternoon:

While we may not agree with you on the specifics of Arizona’s SB 1070 and California “sanctuary cities,” we can surely agree that both policies were the result of failures at the federal level.

After reflecting on the fact that you had 10 years and either a Republican President or Republican Congress with which to fix this growing problem, we decided to give you the benefit of the doubt and research the matter further.

What we found is that in your ten years in Congress, you did not produce comprehensive immigration reform. By failing to lead on this vitally important economic and national security issue, you were part of the problem.

The letter goes on to demand Campbell own up to his failures and apologize for creating this ugly situation:

It seems to us you're trying to use your own failures as an excuse to lend your name and credentials to an indefensible law, while pandering to extremist elements with hopes that it will help you win an election. But facts, and your own record of outright failure to lead on the issue of immigration, speak much louder than election year pandering.

So now we are calling on you, formally, to apologize to the people of California and America for abdicating your responsibility to fix our immigration system when you had the chance.

The letter also takes issue with Campbell's other justifications for the Arizona law:

As for SB 1070, you also suggested in your email that "Californians ought to watch the experience of our neighbor state before rushing to condemn it." It seems to us that Californians unfortunately have a lot of experience with using immigration status as a basis for racial discrimination. We know the division and pain it causes, and therefore have a strong basis to condemn Arizona. That's why a growing number of Californians, including faith leaders, are calling for Arizona to repeal its law.

You also view the application of legal authority by law enforcement officers from a perspective of privilege. African Americans across the nation, and now Latinos in Arizona, have been victims of documented racial profiling for decades. "Reasonable suspicion" allows for police officers to subjectively determine whether to pull-over or stop a "suspect". This law is similar to the law enforcement policy that allows police to shoot if they "feel in danger". This is nothing more than "shoot first, ask questions later". Already Californians are being targeted by Arizona authorities -- just two weeks ago a U.S. citizen from Fresno with dark skin was pulled over and arrested by Arizona police for not having his birth certificate on him.

In other words, racial profiling is already a serious problem. Arizona already settled a lawsuit with the ACLU over rampant racial profiling, and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a noted defender of racial profiling. This is the behavior Campbell is enabling.

We haven't heard back from Tom Campbell on this most recent letter. But no matter what his response, now isn't the time to let up. Sign your name to the Courage Campaign/CFT letter and show Tom Campbell that California won't stand for his defense of the indefensible.

Below the fold is the email we sent to our members:   Read More »

Arizona has gone off the deep end. California's neighbor, and a home for many ex-Californians, has passed and Governor Jan Brewer has signed a radical and extremist bill, SB 1070, that legalizes racial profiling and implements a host of unconstitutional rules that abrogate civil liberties and subject anyone not carrying proper identification to immediate arrest.

The backlash to SB 1070 is already underway. Presente.org is organizing a a boycott of Arizona, which I've joined. I have a lot of family who live in Arizona, but I'm not going to subject myself to a police state to visit them; they can come to California.

The picture at right, of Governor Brewer's signing announcement, tells you all you need to know about what is happening here. Despite the fact that people with brown skin lived in Arizona *long* before anyone with white skin, and despite the fact that Arizona has had a long heritage of Latinos predating US conquest, and despite the fact that Latinos and Native Americans and other non-whites have lived there up to the present, a vocal minority of Arizona's white population has decided that being brown in Arizona is a crime.

Using "illegal immigration" as justification, Republicans led by Russell Pearce are waging a war against a people who are as Arizonan as they are, against a "culture" that is indigenous, not foreign. Here's what Pearce had to say to NPR in 2008:

Invaders, that's what they [undocumented immigrants] are. Invaders on the American sovereignty and it can't be tolerated....

Pearce claims illegal immigrants are responsible for much of Arizona's crime and he admits to feeling uncomfortable with the way society is changing in Arizona. He attributes it partly to Mexicans' and Central Americans' "way of doing business."

"Drive around parts of Phoenix. I get calls all the time and it's not that they're Hispanic, it's because the culture is different. The gangs are bigger. There's more violence, kidnappings are way up," he says.

This conflation of "illegal" with "Hispanic" is by no means new, even though there are lots of Irish undocumented immigrants in the US. What Pearce represents is the very same phenomenon we're all too familiar with here in California: white anxiety at the fact that their country was never as white as they believed, and is becoming steadily more diverse. Blaming "illegals" is merely an easier way of couching one's racism.

This is especially true in private conversations. Just as one can very easily find anti-Latino racism expressed in white Orange County households, you can find it even more commonly expressed in white communities in Arizona. This is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of Arizona whites moved there from California in search of a less diverse, more white place to live.

As anyone with any knowledge of California history ought to be aware, Arizona is merely following a trail the Golden State blazed long ago. In the 1850s during the Gold Rush, Anglo Californians harassed, attacked, killed, deported, and took the land of Latinos, whether they were native-born Californios or people who came here to seek wealth in the gold fields.

Over the next 150 years racism persisted, only to be dramatically reinforced when Proposition 187 was passed by 2/3rds of voters at the November 1994 election. Prop 187 was ultimately ruled unconstitutional by the courts, and it led to a shift of Latinos away from the Republican Party and towards Democrats in California that has never been reversed.

Today's Republican Party remains every bit as anti-immigrant and anti-Latino as it was in 1994. The two candidates for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, have spent weeks airing TV ads trying to outdo each other in immigrant-bashing. Steve Poizner wrote in his new book that "From an intellectual standpoint, I absolutely know not to expect Silicon Valley-type caliber ambition and smarts from East San Jose schoolkids," most of whom are Latinos.

We can expect California Republicans to use Arizona's SB 1070 as a model for similar bills they will almost certainly push this year in the Legislature. California Democrats still hold enough seats to block this, but we have to continuously reinforce to them the fact that Californians opposed these kind of anti-immigrant laws.

It's also a powerful argument for the federal government to get off its ass and finally act on comprehensive immigration reform. Californians Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer would do well to act quickly, to ensure that no other states follow Arizona's unconscionable and horrific lead.

Oh, and we might want to put up some signs on Interstate 10 in Blythe warning eastbound travelers that they're about to enter a police state.

By the way: Sign the act.ly petition to have CalPERS divest itself of investments in Arizona companies and Arizona real estate. Let's make AZ regret this.

I received this video from Brave Film Foundation and thought it would be a good idea to post it, so that New Yorkers can be aware of this particular congressman... who is against marriage equality, along with other social justice issues...



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgBmQMSmCrY&feature=player_embedded

My blog post from www.libertyhill.typepad.com on May 11, 2009

Like many of you, I go to several fundraisers per month.  I receive dozens of direct mail pieces.  All have a common message in the last six months. "Times are difficult but we'd appreciate it if you can find a tiny morsel more for our important cause."  Ok, so maybe not that timid, but you get the point.  Everyone feels obligated to somehow acknowledge the economic situation before asking for money for critically important work.

I'm a progressive working for economic and racial justice.  I'm a gay man fighting for marriage equality. The need for social change after 8 years of the Bush Administration has never been more dire. And the political opportunity with progressives in power from City Hall to Sacramento to the White House has never been greater. 

This is not the time for us to cut back our giving out of fear of what may happen or because our investments are down.  If we are employed or still have accumulated assets (admittedly somewhat less of them), this is the time to give and give more generously than ever. 

 If not now, when? 

As Angelenos who count immigrants both documented and undocumented amongst our friends and neighbors and The White House is calling for true immigration reform, if not now, when?

When more people than ever need access to affordable housing due to high unemployment, if not now, when?

When the basic civil right of marriage for gay and lesbian Californians can be won, if not now, when?

I will not give less in these hard times and I will ask you to join me in stretching further than ever.  The time is now.  Not two years from now when our investments bounce back.  Not six months from now when our property values rebound a little. 

"Change will NOT come if we wait for SOME OTHER PERSON OR SOME OTHER TIME" --Barack Obama

Not some other person or some other time.  It's you.  It's me.  Today is our day.  We need to dig deep and give our time and our money.  We will never see a bigger return on our investments in social change than investing big. Today.

Well I am just shocked, shocked to see that the wingnuts are using swine flu to bash immigrants. As I predicted over the weekend as soon as I heard that there was a swine flu issue in Mexico, the usual suspects who believe that anyone from south of the border is inherently inferior, criminal, disease-ridden and just plain subhuman are using this issue to try again to rally Americans to hate their neighbors, whether they live next door or across an artificial line.

This is a sadly familiar story to those of us who study California history. As recounted in Nayan Shah's excellent book Contagious Divides, a 1905 plague epidemic in San Francisco was blamed on the city's Chinese residents, and became an occasion to physically quarantine the entire neighborhood. Serious proposals to expel the entire Chinese population were considered, and for about four decades afterward every Chinese person who came to the US was quarantined on Angel Island, in bleak and often unsanitary conditions.

Hell, even during the Black Death in the 1300s Europe was full of conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the plague, a meme that unfortunately persevered well into the 20th century, coming to a head in Hitler's Germany.

As usual, immigrant bashing is done by right-wing populists unwilling to admit that their ideology of subservience to wealth and power is actually what's behind the problem. In this case factory farms appear to have played a significant role in causing and spreading the epidemic. That's not a problem unique to Mexico - anyone who's read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation knows that similar conditions exist right here in the good ol' US of A.

There are other aspects of this issue that suggest the assumed superiority of American over Mexican is utterly baseless. While waiting in the San José Airport this morning I caught a report on a Texas town's concerns over swine flu. One man who came down with the flu - and who quickly recovered - said "well I think we just have a better health care system here than they do down there."

As many who have studied American pandemic preparedness are all too aware, of course, this is bollocks - our health care system is in tatters and would be totally unable to handle a serious flu epidemic. There too, the wingnuts blame immigrants, but the truth is that the system fails the native-born just as often, and for the same reason - because profit has been emphasized over safety and health. God forbid we actually focus on that!

That conservatives would be so quick to repeat these sordid lies should surprise no one, but it should outrage everyone.

The 1994 election was a turning point for California. Pete Wilson cruised to reelection and Republicans won 40 seats in the Assembly in a year friendly for Republicans around the country. But that election sowed the seeds of the Republicans' downfall in California, turning the state deep blue and sending the Republican Party into a death spiral.

The reason was Proposition 187. Scapegoating immigrants for economic problems is one of *the* most common political phenomena in California history, as the Chinese, the Japanese, the Filipinos, the Okies, and Latinos can tell you. The 1990s saw an upswing in immigrant-bashing and in 1994 a group of Orange County Republicans put on the ballot this attack on the rights of the undocumented. Prop 187 would have denied schooling, medical care and other social services to undocumented immigrants and their families.

It passed by a large margin in November 1994, but was never implemented. Courts granted injunctions against its enforcement, and in early 1999 when Gray Davis became governor, the state's appeals to uphold the initiative were dropped.

It was a pyrrhic victory for Republicans. The anti-Latino attitudes voiced by many Prop 187 supporters drove California Latinos into the arms of the Democratic Party. Voter registration soared, and many Latino immigrants became citizens to protect their rights at the ballot box. Since the 1996 election Republican fortunes have been in terminal decline in California, a party that has become a Zombie Death Cult more interested in purity fights than addressing California's needs.

Of course, anti-immigrant sentiment never really went away after 1994. By 2003 it had returned and played a role in Davis' recall, as the recession led to renewed immigrant-bashing and Arnold Schwarzenegger ran on the "driver's licenses" issue. Still, Arnold had little appetite for actually pushing anti-immigrant legislation while governor, and somewhat surprisingly, the anti-immigrant movement never tried to go to the ballot to revive Prop 187 or otherwise target the undocumented.

Until now.

Right-wingers have in circulation an initiative to raise Prop 187 from the dead:

Requires applicants for state, local, and state-administered federal aid to verify lawful presence in United States. Requires applications for public benefits submitted by undocumented parents on behalf of their lawful-resident children to be given to federal authorities. Denies birth certificates to children born to undocumented parents unless mother provides fingerprint and other information to be given to federal authorities. Limits benefits for children in child-only CalWORKS cases to federal minimum. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government: If upheld in the courts, unknown potential one-time and ongoing costs to state and local governments due to changes in the application process for public benefits as well as changes in the way birth certificates are issued. These costs would be partly offset by additional new fees for certain birth certificates. Unknown, but probably minor, state and local law enforcement costs due to provisions in the measure creating new crimes, such as for the filing of false affidavits to obtain public benefits. If upheld in the courts, state savings of over $1 billion annually from prohibiting child-only CalWORKs cases, partially offset by state and county costs for children who shifted to Foster Care or county general assistance programs. Further unknown savings from the provisions changing the application processes for public benefits. (09-0004.)

This is not just a revival of Prop 187, of course - it goes after CalWORKS as well, an effort to scale back the safety net couched in an attack on the children of the undocumented. This is an especially sick and unconscionable attack on Californians in a time of crisis, especially the deliberate targeting of children in order to cause them pain and suffering.

Obviously this is part of the Republicans' 2010 election strategy. Despite the fact that earlier efforts in 2006 to ride anti-immigrant sentiment to victory failed spectacularly for Republicans, and despite the massive political price they paid after 1994 for backing Prop 187, they are at it again.

And although we'd like to think that Californians would reject this kind of horrific attack on our neighbors and community members, the wide margin of victory for Prop 187 in 1994, the passage of Prop 8 last fall, and the *long* history of immigrant scapegoating in California suggests to me that these have a very high chance of passage.

Progressives and Democrats will have to start organizing NOW to fight this, starting with a "do not sign" campaign.

And in a related move, George Runner has an initiative in circulation to mandate voters bring a photo ID to the polls. This maneuver has been used by Republicans to suppress the vote in several other states, including Georgia, and is of dubious constitutionality. I include it here because Runner is almost certainly going to sell this as a crackdown on the undocumented, who don't have that kind of photo ID.

Republicans nationally and here in California appear determined to treat 2010 like 1994. Progressives and Democrats need to be ready to fight back.

In the midst of all the attention focused on the presidential race and Prop 8, the statewide measure that would take away basic civil rights from certain classes of people, a county measure in Los Angeles is beginning to heat up. Measure R, put forth by transit officials proposes to raise $40 billion for light rail, buses and road work through a half-cent sales tax hike is beginning to garner the attention it deserves in the final moments of this election calendar.

Anyone living in Los Angeles will quickly tell you about the nightmare of living in a metropolis whose leaders long gone, decided against the foresight of developing a public transportation system that you would easily find in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco-Oakland Bay area and Washington, DC.

And unlike many of those urban centers, the population continues to grow thanks to its climate, immigration (legal and illegal) and Hollywood dreams. Housing and transportation needs are busting at the seems and the transit officials are asking residents to fund a broad range of improvements through a sales tax increase.   Read More »

Cross posted at Calitics

There's a protest from 3-5pm today at Blackwater's new Otay Mesa facility, and tomorrow Jeremy Scahill will be doing a special Courage Campaign Conversation tomorrow afternoon at 4pm.

In a little noticed vote yesterday, the Merida Initiative passed easily through the House of Representatives 311-106. It provides $1.6 billion with an emphasis on training and equipment to fight drug cartels in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America, because as Rep. Brian Bilbray explained:

"Either we can go after these cartels in Ensenada, or we can fight them in Escondido," said Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Carlsbad), who voted for the plan. "I'd prefer that we move now and take care of this problem south of the border. The drug wars in Mexico and in other regions have grown horrendously violent, and their destructive ways must be quashed."

It's tough to directly take issue with any of that, but where does it lead? Potentially to some unpleasant places. In September, the Defense Department opened up five year contracts in support of counter-narcoterrorism efforts to five private companies, including Blackwater USA. "The indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract could be worth up to $15 billion for the awardees." The Army Times analyzed the content of the contracts, describing:   Read More »

Imagine having to say goodbye to your wife and child against your will. Imagine telling your little boy he's going away for a couple months on vacation when the reality is it will be years before you see him again. Tony doesn't have to imagine. Click the video to the right to watch Tony's heart-wrenching story.

Tony and his wife Janina came from Poland 18 years ago. They were married, started a business, had a healthy happy son and were living the American dream...

...Until 1 week ago, on June 8, 2007, when Janina was deported.   Read More »