← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Okiereddust
Thread ID: 17607 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2005-04-02
2005-04-02 04:25 | User Profile
In a stunning reversal of policy, President George W. Bush today ordered units of the California, Arizona and Texas National Guard to seal off the border with Mexico. New Mexico units were delayed on orders of Governor Richardson. (Late reports have Richardson fleeing to Mexico.)
"The Minutemen have shown me the error of my ways," Bush told a hastily called news conference . "These men an women are the heart beat of America and are real heroes."
Bush said that he had also ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to begin building a permanent barrier along the U.S./Mexico border. "In these times of deficits it is silly not to use the most cost-effective means of protecting our borders." the president said. ..........
[URL=http://tinyurl.com/4bmyh]04.01.2005 | DOH News Service[/URL]
2005-04-02 05:10 | User Profile
You waited until there were only 35 minutes left before midnight so you could get in the last April fools joke. I hate April first!
2005-04-02 08:28 | User Profile
I had a feeling the thread title was too good to be true. :lol:
2005-04-02 14:13 | User Profile
Okie? GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR for a second I thought you were giving me a real birthday present, April 2.
Sure wish it was true.
2005-04-02 16:03 | User Profile
Maybe they're nuts but Minutemen have been effective
Apr. 2, 2005 12:00 AM
Say what you want about the Minuteman movement.
Call the people involved vigilantes. Call them gun nuts. Call them crackpots in camouflage.
I'd call them fairly effective. Before they even set foot among the scrub oak and chaparral of southeastern Arizona, they have done what politicians and policymakers in this part of the country have been unable to do.
They have, as advertisers like to say, reached their target audience.
On Wednesday, just two days before the Minutemen assembled on the Arizona-Mexico border, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection hightailed it to Tucson to announce a "comprehensive strategy" to secure the border. Suddenly, Arizona is getting 534 new Border Patrol agents. Suddenly, Arizona is getting 23 aircraft to patrol the border, to bolster the 15 here. So urgent is the need, that 155 officers are en route. "The point is, we're determined to take control of our border," Robert Bonner, the border commissioner, said.
Well, that's novel.
Bonner said Wednesday's announcement had nothing to do with the prospect of hundreds of people headed to the banks of the San Pedro River to "help" the government do what it has been unable to do.
Of course it didn't. This administration and this Congress have been determined to take control of the border for years now.
Which explains why 11 million people are in this country illegally. Which explains why one in three newcomers to Arizona over the past five years is a person who had to sneak into the state. Which explains all those crackdowns on employers who provide the jobs that lured them here.
What crackdowns, you ask? Oh yeah, well never mind. Is it any wonder that some people finally got fed up?
Despite all the gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands, the Minuteman Project is really just a monthlong publicity stunt. But if the California accountant who organized it can keep his volunteers under control, and that's a big if, it could be the best thing that ever happened at the border.
Shame, after all, can be a powerful motivator. If nothing else, immigration is suddenly front and center.
President Bush has called them vigilantes, and Mexican President Vicente Fox decried them as "migrant hunters," vowing to take them to court if they break the law. As he should. But here's an idea. If you're worried about citizens mobilizing at the border, if you're worried about where all the anti-illegal immigration sentiment in this country is headed, there is a way to stop it.
Fix the problem.
Surely a country that can send people to live in space, that can cure disease, that can accomplish any number of amazing feats, can figure out a way to fix, finally, that standing joke we call our immigration policy. Surely the people we entrust with running this country can pass some realistic laws that actually work, then enforce them, at the border and in the workplace.
As for Mexico, surely a country that puts out guides telling people how to safely cross the border can put out a guide warning them not to dare try it.
The fact is, if Bush and Fox had done their jobs, the only people who would be in Tombstone this weekend would be tourists in search of the O.K. Corral. Instead, we'll be holding our breath this month and hoping that things don't blow up at the border.
For now, vigilance is the watchword.
The Minutemen will be watching the border crossers and human rights activists will be watching the Minutemen.
As for the rest of us: we should be carefully watching our leaders.
Reach Roberts at [email]laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com[/email] or (602) 444-8635.
[url]http://www.azcentral.com/php-bin/clicktrack/print.php?referer=http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/0402roberts02.html[/url]
2005-04-02 16:28 | User Profile
...while the Cheap Labor Plutocrat, Bush Junior, cheers on the Mestizo Invasion.
OPERATION WETBACK. Operation Wetback was a repatriation project of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service to remove illegal Mexican immigrants ("wetbacks") from the Southwest. During the first decades of the twentieth century, the majority of migrant workers who crossed the border illegally did not have adequate protection against exploitation by American farmers. As a result of the Good Neighbor Policy, Mexico and the United States began negotiating an accord to protect the rights of Mexican agricultural workers. Continuing discussions and modifications of the agreement were so successful that the Congress chose to formalize the "temporary" program into the Bracero program,qv authorized by Public Law 78. In the early 1940s, while the program was being viewed as a success in both countries, Mexico excluded Texas from the labor-exchange program on the grounds of widespread violation of contracts, discrimination against migrant workers, and such violations of their civil rights as perfunctory arrests for petty causes. Oblivious to the Mexican charges, some grower organizations in Texas continued to hire illegal Mexican workers and violate such mandates of PL 78 as the requirement to provide workers transportation costs from and to Mexico, fair and lawful wages, housing, and health services. World War IIqv and the postwar period exacerbated the Mexican exodus to the United States, as the demand for cheap agricultural laborers increased. Graft and corruption on both sides of the border enriched many Mexican officials as well as unethical "coyote" freelancers in the United States who promised contracts in Texas for the unsuspecting Bracero. Studies conducted over a period of several years indicate that the Bracero program increased the number of illegal aliens in Texas and the rest of the country. Because of the low wages paid to legal, contracted braceros, many of them skipped out on their contracts either to return home or to work elsewhere for better wages as wetbacks.
Increasing grievances from various Mexican officials in the United States and Mexico prompted the Mexican government to rescind the bracero agreement and cease the export of Mexican workers. The United States Immigration Service, under pressure from various agricultural groups, retaliated against Mexico in 1951 by allowing thousands of illegals to cross the border, arresting them, and turning them over to the Texas Employment Commission,qv which delivered them to work for various grower groups in Texas and elsewhere. Over the long term, this action by the federal government, in violation of immigration laws and the agreement with Mexico, caused new problems for Texas. Between 1944 and 1954, "the decade of the wetback," the number of illegal aliens coming from Mexico increased by 6,000 percent. It is estimated that in 1954 before Operation Wetback got under way, more than a million workers had crossed the Rio Grande illegally. Cheap labor displaced native agricultural workers, and increased violation of labor laws and discrimination encouraged criminality, disease, and illiteracy. According to a study conducted in 1950 by the President's Commission on Migratory Labor in Texas, the Rio Grande valleyqv cotton growers were paying approximately half of the wages paid elsewhere in Texas. In 1953 a McAllen newspaper clamored for justice in view of continuing criminal activities by wetbacks.
The resulting Operation Wetback, a national reaction against illegal immigration, began in Texas in mid-July 1954. Headed by the commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization Service, Gen. Joseph May Swing, the United States Border Patrol aided by municipal, county, state, and federal authorities, as well as the military, began a quasimilitary operation of search and seizure of all illegal immigrants. Fanning out from the lower Rio Grande valley, Operation Wetback moved northward. Illegal aliens were repatriated initially through Presidio because the Mexican city across the border, Ojinaga, had rail connections to the interior of Mexico by which workers could be quickly moved on to Durango. A major concern of the operation was to discourage reentry by moving the workers far into the interior. Others were to be sent through El Paso. On July 15, the first day of the operation, 4,800 aliens were apprehended. Thereafter the daily totals dwindled to an average of about 1,100 a day. The forces used by the government were actually relatively small, perhaps no more than 700 men, but were exaggerated by border patrol officials who hoped to scare illegal workers into flight back to Mexico. Valley newspapers also exaggerated the size of the government forces for their own purposes: generally unfavorable editorials attacked the Border Patrol as an invading army seeking to deprive Valley farmers of their inexpensive labor force. While the numbers of deportees remained relatively high, the illegals were transported across the border on trucks and buses. As the pace of the operation slowed, deportation by sea began on the Emancipation, which ferried wetbacks from Port Isabel, Texas, to Veracruz, and on other ships. Ships were a preferred mode of transport because they carried the illegal workers farther away from the border than did buses, trucks, or trains. The boat lift continued until the drowning of seven deportees who jumped ship from the Mercurio provoked a mutiny and led to a public outcry against the practice in Mexico. Other aliens, particularly those apprehended in the Midwest states, were flown to Brownsville and sent into Mexico from there. The operation trailed off in the fall of 1954 as INS funding began to run out.
It is difficult to estimate the number of illegal aliens forced to leave by the operation. The INS claimed as many as 1,300,000, though the number officially apprehended did not come anywhere near this total. The INS estimate rested on the claim that most aliens, fearing apprehension by the government, had voluntarily repatriated themselves before and during the operation. The San Antonio district, which included all of Texas outside of El Paso and the Trans-Pecos,qv had officially apprehended slightly more than 80,000 aliens, and local INS officials claimed that an additional 500,000 to 700,000 had fled to Mexico before the campaign began. Many commentators have considered these figure to be exaggerated. Various groups opposed any form of temporary labor in the United States. The American G.I. Forum,qv for instance, by and large had little or no sympathy for the man who crossed the border illegally. Apparently the Texas State Federation of Laborqv supported the G.I. Forum's position. Eventually the two organizations coproduced a study entitled What Price Wetbacks?, which concluded that illegal aliens in United States agriculture damaged the health of the American people, that illegals displaced American workers, that they harmed the retailers of McAllen, and that the open-border policy of the American government posed a threat to the security of the United States. Critics of Operation Wetback considered it xenophobic and heartless.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carl Allsup, The American G.I. Forum: Origins and Evolution (University of Texas Center for Mexican American Studies Monograph 6, Austin, 1982). Arnoldo De León, Mexican Americans in Texas: A Brief History (Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1993). Juan Ramon Garcia, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980). Eleanor M. Hadley, "A Critical Analysis of the Wetback Problem," Law and Contemporary Problems 21 (Spring 1956). Saturday Evening Post, July 27, 1946. Julian Samora, Los Mojados: The Wetback Story (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971).
Fred L. Koestler
[url]http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/OO/pqo1.html[/url]
2005-04-03 13:07 | User Profile
[url]http://www.tombstonetumbleweed.com/This_Week/MinutemanProjectAlreadySucc.htm[/url]
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