Oscar-nominated writer-director Chris Weitz is known for making popular fare like American Pie, About a Boy and Twilight: New Moon. But last year he made the independent feature A Better Life, which chronicles an undocumented gardener in East LA as he tries to create better opportunities and a better life for his son. Star Demián Bichir received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Carlos Galindo.

And obviously, this topic of immigration and the undocumented stuck with Weitz. Because he has now trained his camera on Alabama and the fallout in that state from HB 56, the draconian immigration measures that have led to mass chaos.

Weitz created four short films, all available at the site Is This Alabama. The documentary shorts all look at the Alabama law in a variety of different contexts. In one, Weitz talks to African-Americans who look at the law in the context of their own struggles for civil rights in Alabama. As U.W. Clemons, a former chief justice at a US District Court in the state, says, “Since it’s pretty clear that they can’t put us out because we’re not carrying the right kind of card, they’ve turned on the new Negro, the Hispanics.”

Another film, “The Two Faces of Alabama,” contrasts an obvious bigot with a white teacher expressing upset over the ramifications of the law, which has caused the majority of Hispanic students to leave school out of fear that their parents will be targeted for deportation. A third, “Not the Kind of Alabama I Want,” features an older white Alabamian who is disgusted with the fear and hatred that the law has sown. Finally, “An Alabama Mother Speaks” gives voice to an Hispanic mother, who will not show her face on camera, to tell her story and the story of her children. “They just want to be free, they want to go to the park” the woman says of her kids. “They don’t understand why Mommy and Daddy are crying.”

The effective films tell the human story of a law that has caused such an upheaval in Alabama that even Republican lawmakers, including the Governor, have acknowledged the need to change it. But Weitz and the Is This Alabama coalition want the law to be fully repealed.

The films are premiering at this hour at the Center for American Progress, alongside a new report, “Alabama’s Immigration Disaster: The Harshest Law in the Land Harms the State’s Economy and Society,” which details the impact of HB 56 on the state’s economy and its families. Here’s an excerpt.

Overall, as Professor Samuel Addy of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration has illustrated, because of H.B. 56, Alabama could lose up to $10.8 billion (or 6.2 percent of its gross domestic product), up to 140,000 jobs in the state, $264.5 million in state tax revenue, and $93 million in local tax revenue.

These costs will all be incurred to drive out an undocumented population that is estimated to be only 2.5 percent of the state—a population that paid $130 million into the state’s tax coffers in 2010.

Using story-telling talent to get across the breadth of the devastation in Alabama is a good tactic for progressive activists. Hopefully this will be a beginning and not an anomaly.

This is the right-wing’s answer to the question of how you deport 11 million unauthorized immigrants: You don’t. You force them to “deport themselves.” Although immigration reform advocates would prefer a solution that involves a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants already here, Romney and his top immigration advisers believe they can remove millions of people through heavy-handed enforcement that makes life for unauthorized immigrants intolerable. This approach is notable for its complete lack of discretion and flexibility. Unauthorized immigrant parents with citizen children who need to go to school? Americans who are married to an undocumented immigrant who needs medical treatment? “Self-deportation” hits them all with the same mailed fist.

One group has boldly stepped forward to congratulate Romney on his stance. As Dave Weigel reports, they call themselves Patriots for Self-Deportation:

The grassroots organization Patriots for Self-Deportation, formed last year in response to legislative inaction on the issue of birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants (also known as the “anchor baby” problem), announced today the launch of their website, SelfDeport.org. The group describes SelfDeport.org as a resource for patriotic Americans who wish to set an example of responsible citizenship by proving their own rights to remain in this great nation.

The group hopes the website and issue benefits from Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s endorsement of self-deportation as a solution to the problem of illegal immigration, according to spokesman Stephen Winters.

Here’s the site. And here are their core principles:

1) America belongs to REAL Americans.
2) Illegals and their anchor babies are here ILLEGALLY.
3) US citizenship is for those who can show PROOF their original ancestors were here legally.
4) All illegals and descendants of illegals are here ILLEGALLY and must be DEPORTED at once.
If you can’t prove you belong here, REPATRIATE!

This is a parody, if you haven’t guessed. The video at the site comes from an American whose family is Polish, and who cannot prove that they didn’t sneak into the country. Therefore, he’s doing the patriotic thing and self-deporting. With this standard, the country would get cleaned out of “illegals” in no time, and all of the sons and daughters of the American Revolution left – or perhaps just Native Americans, I’m not sure where they draw the line – would have a few hundred acres of land to themselves. The country would fall into serious decline, but hey, at least we’d all be legal.

Their slogan is “Stopping illegal immigration starts with you.” I think there’s a lesson in there for all of us.

Next, Gutierrez seeks a better definition of “extreme hardship” so that families who cannot travel to get their visa, or who have small children or are in the military, can stay in the country for a period of time. “If you’re undocumented and you get a visa, you have to stay out of the country for 10 years,” said Gutierrez. “An American citizen has to travel to Ciudad Juarez, which is the only place in Mexico to get a visa. And Americans are told by the State Department not to travel there because of the danger! That’s an extreme hardship.”

That’s essentially what the Administration will attack here. “The new rule would let children and spouses of citizens ask the government to decide on the waiver request before the illegal immigrant heads to his or her home country to apply for a visa,” according to the report. Eventually, the undocumented immigrant would have to travel to get the visa, but with all the affairs in order beforehand, they can just go back, pick up the visa, and return, rather than having to separate from their families for years.

This is hardly “back-door amnesty,” as Republicans will surely charge. It’s a way to streamline the extreme hardship process, in the best interest of families. The government accepted the extreme hardship cases of about 70% of applicants last year. But this would make the process actually work, turning an ordeal that lasts months or years into one that lasts days or weeks. The rule will not take effect until later in the year, with the proposal just hitting the Federal Register today.

Combined with the deportation review of about 300,000 cases, which is still getting off the ground in the nation’s immigration courts, the Administration is basically following Gutierrez’ recommendations for what they can do outside of the legislative process to make the immigration system work better and help keep families united. Ultimately, you will need a legislative solution to the problem of 11-12 million undocumented immigrants in the country. And the deportation review has progressed too slowly, while the actual deportations accelerated. So these are good steps to take, but immigration advocates still need to show vigilance to get a workable solution.

(photo: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Shutterstock.com)

“I’m Running for Office, for Pete’s Sake! I Can’t Have Illegals!”
-Mitt Romney, criticizing his genealogy

In the ultimate flip-flop, Mitt Romney will soon be announcing that he is not an exxxxtreeeeme white guy, but is instead … a Mexican:

Heading into the New Hampshire primary, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has a strong lead in the polls as he continues his effort to become the Republican nominee challenging President Obama in the fall. That would mean, of course, that the 64-year-old Romney would be closer to The White House than any Mormon ever has been.

If Romney secures the nomination, he would also be the first presidential nominee whose father was born in Mexico.

It’s a little-known fact that there’s a whole branch of Mitt Romney’s family living south of the border, including his second cousin Leighton Romney, and about 40 other relatives descended from religious pioneers who first traveled to Mexico 125 years ago. These days, the Romneys of Mexico enjoy pleasant and productive lives in two remaining settlements: Colonia Juarez and Colonia Dublan, just 175 miles south of the border.

“He’s got a great pioneer heritage starting with people that crossed the plains going from Illinois to Utah, and then on from Utah down to Mexico,” Leighton Romney told NBC’s Mike Taibbi in an interview to air Monday night on ‘Rock Center with Brian Williams.’ “So there’s a great heritage there of people that had to fight for what they believed in and for people that had to travel to different places and learn different things. I think there’s a vast amount of experience that he could draw from there.”

Viva!

In his public life Mitt Romney has said and written little about his ancestors’ history in Mexico. In one oft-repeated quote he said his family left the U.S. for Mexico to escape persecution for their religious beliefs.

In fact, Romney’s great grandfather, Miles Park Romney, led that first expedition to escape not persecution but prosecution for polygamy, or what Mormons called ‘plural marriage.’ After polygamy ended, the family remained in Mexico.

For those keeping score at home, “plural marriage” is like “opposite marriage” but one louder; not that it matters because it is every bit as bad as gayhomofag marriage if you ask Rick Santorum. Needless to say Mitt will soon be referring to himself as ‘El Mitt-O’ as is the custom of white people when confronted with the mysteries of that crazy moon-man language that we call Spanish.

Bradford Wells and Anthony John Makk, a bi-national, married gay couple who have lived most of the 19 years of their relationship in San Francisco’s Castro district, today won a two year stay against the threat of deportation, thanks to the personal intervention of their representative, House leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco.

Makk is a citizen of Australia married to Wells, a U.S. citizen who suffers from AIDS-related illnesses. Makk is his primary caregiver. The couple was denied consideration of spousal immigration benefits by the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, which bars all federal benefits to same-sex couples.

This is a two-year reprieve.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a letter to Makk today saying he has been granted “deferred action” on his case for two years. The letter said the action is “an exercise of prosecutorial discretion” that allows the agency not to pursue deportation for a specific period. Makk met multiple conditions of the agency’s new guidelines for immigration agents to prioritize deportation cases, including family ties, status as a primary caregiver, lack of criminal record and his long period of legal residence under a series of visas that eventually expired.

Pelosi broke the news to the couple herself today, and issued a statement calling the resolution of the case “a personal victory for Bradford and Anthony” that “keeps this loving couple together.” She said she would continue to fight for repeal of DOMA.

The two-year reprieve maintains Makk’s legal status, which he has been for all of the nineteen years the couple has been together in America.

Steve Ralls, a spokesman for Immigration Equality, the advocacy group that championed their case, Makk can now remain lawfully in the United States, as he has since first entering the country nearly two decades ago. The so-called deferral is also renewable, meaning it could be extended when it expires in two years

It is entirely possible that within two years, should DOMA be court-overturned or legislated away, this kind of deportation of one member of a same-sex couple will be history. Let’s hope so.

h/t Immigration Equality, on Facebook

ICE arresting US citizens and wrongly deporting them (photo vis Wikipedia)

If you want to understand why the Obama Administration should have some concern about Latino voter turnout in 2012, look no further than this story.

(Lorene) Turner has been searching for (her granddaughter) Jakadrien since the fall of 2010, when she ran away from home. She was 14 years old and distraught over the loss of her grandfather and her parents’ divorce [...]

Turner said with the help of Dallas Police, she found her granddaughter in the most unexpected place – Colombia.

Where she had mistakenly been deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in April of 2011.

“They didn’t do their work,” Turner said. “How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?”

The authorities chalk it up to a case of mistaken identity. Jakadrien did run away to Houston, and she got arrested for petty theft. She provided a fake name to Houston police, and it matched an undocumented immigrant from Colombia. So ICE got involved and deported the girl.

But this is a massive error. ICE is supposed to base their deportations on fingerprint matches. In this case, they based it off this fake name. Jakadrien’s identity was never confirmed. She’s African-American, not Hispanic. She doesn’t even speak Spanish.

It’s amazing that this grandmother found Jakadrien, through Facebook, in Colombia. But this shows the danger of Secure Communities, the system that connects ICE with local law enforcement, as well as the zeal to deport.

And by the way, the story doesn’t yet have a happy ending. The Colombian government won’t release Jakadrien from the detention facility where she is being held.

ICE is “investigating” the incident. But the speed with which people are being deported simply invites tragedies like this. Secure Communities has swept up multiple innocent people, including Americans, into a Kafka-esque nightmare. All in the name of “looking tough” on immigration.

Tucson students occupy a school board meeting (Image: thesoundstrike.info)

While students were on their holiday break, Arizona issued a disturbing wake-up call to anyone who thought the education system had evolved to reflect America’s diversity. In a legal challenge to a controversial law passed in 2010, an administrative law judge pummeled a flagship educational initiative by supporting restrictions on programs based on Latino history and culture.

The judge decided that the curriculum used in Tucson’s Mexican American studies programs was biased against white people, apparently because it advocates critical historical perspectives and emphasizes struggles of indigenous and Latino communities, as well as the links between that legacy and contemporary politics. The ruling comes as no surprise, as the struggle between the school district and school superintendent John Huppenthal has been dragging on for months. The focus now is on a pending federal lawsuit aimed at halting the law.

CNN quotes from ruling:

In Tuesday’s ruling, administrative law judge Lewis Kowal said the auditors observed only a limited number of classes. He added, “Teaching oppression objectively is quite different than actively presenting material in a biased, political, and emotionally charged manner.”

“Teaching in such a manner promotes social or political activism against the white people, promotes racial resentment, and advocates ethnic solidarity, instead of treating pupils as individuals,” Kowal wrote. He cited a lesson that taught students that the historic treatment of Mexican-Americans was “marked by the use of force, fraud and exploitation,” and a parent’s complaint that one of her daughters, who was white, was shunned by Latino classmates after a government course was taught “in an extremely biased manner.”

So to sum up, it is “extremely biased” to teach critical viewpoints of the oppression, displacement and systematic discrimination that Mexicans and other groups have encountered throughout U.S. history.  [cont'd.] Because for students to learn about the many atrocities strewn along the path of Manifest Destiny would upset the national narrative of continual social progress, rugged individualism, and free enterprise. And once the veneer of triumphalism begins to crack, students might start to use their often-neglected critical intellect to unravel myths of “personal responsibility” and “equal opportunity” that have propped up neoliberal dreams for the past few generations.

The ruling’s ideological rationale encapsulates the political fictions fueling ethnocentrism in public schools. That’s precisely why many students yearn for education that pushes past negative media portrayals and stereotypes of people of color (and they’re willing to agitate for it). Tucson high school student Korina Lopez, whose father teachers in the district, told Democracy Now!, “It’s very important to me because I know that it teaches a deeper understanding of history and the things you learn. And it just gives you a whole new appreciation of your community and society.”

Ethnic studies in public schools has long been under siege. Though the programs have flourished, enrolling hundreds of elementary, middle and high school students, the law, HB 2281, aimed explicitly to penalize educators that have fought to introduce more critical pedagogy.

According to the federal legal complaint filed by ethnic studies advocates and teachers this fall, the state’s then-school superintendent Tom Horne declared that the Mexican-American Studies Department of Tucson’s No. 1 unified school district “[p]romotes the overthrow of the United States Government.”

The witchhunt rhetoric surrounding the program reflects the overarching paradox of the state’s charge of “bias” in ethnic studies. A glance at the demographic structure of Tucson’s school system shows that individual opportunity doesn’t exactly thrive in communities riven by deeply rooted racial and economic segregation.

The Arizona government’s preference for “teaching oppression objectively” certainly plays out in ironic ways. Authorities have no qualms displaying their own biases when it comes to policing schools and communities. The most glaring example is SB 1070, the law that would encourage the profiling and detention of suspected undocumented immigrants. The state has also marginalized teachers who fell short of “fluency” standards–i.e. people with Spanish accents who teach kids with limited English. At one school in Phoenix, reported the Wall Street Journal last year, “State auditors have reported to the district that some teachers pronounce words such as violet as ‘biolet,’ think as ‘tink’ and swallow the ending sounds of words, as they sometimes do in Spanish.”

If only more Arizona officials had been schooled in the very programs that they seek to outlaw. According to the Save Ethnic Studies campaign, the programs have proven effective not only at supporting academic performance in the conventional sense–higher graduation rates and test scores–but helping close the profound “achievement gaps” that plague low-income communities of color. The campaign stresses that the ethnic studies model incubated in Tucson has become a national model:

98 percent of the students say they do homework at night to keep up with the next day’s class. 95 percent discuss what their learning with their parents. Students have given reports to the TUSD board, Pima County Board of Supervisors, the Arizona state legislature, the Black Congressional Caucus and the Hispanic Congressional Caucus.

“There’s a big myth up there that these classes are about immigration”, says Augustine Romero, Director of Student Equity at TUSD. “It’s actually about analyzing problems in the real world and addressing those problems by coming up with solutions.”

Analyzing problems in the real world and coming up with solutions. If officials think that’s anathema to a sound education, then they’ve given civil rights advocates the most principled argument yet for why ethnic studies is so vital for the next generation of community leaders.

Unmanned Predator MQ-1 drone searches for auto execs (photo: JimNTexas/flickr)

After posting 1,200 National Guard troops at the US-Mexico border to stop crossings of undocumented immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security will draw down those forces by 75% and shift the mission considerably:

The drawdown, which the department characterized as a “transition,” will begin in January and should be completed by March. Several lawmakers told CNN the number of National Guard troops on the border will be cut from 1,200 with responsibilities mainly on the ground to 300 who will support the border mission in the air.

The Department of Homeland Security said the change is possible because of a jump in the number of Border Patrol officers in the region, an increase in technology and a drop in apprehensions at the border.

Of course, the rabid xenophobes in the Republican caucus disagreed with the moves, claiming we don’t have “operational control” of the border and that more troops are actually needed for security. But border arrests have dropped sharply, down 53% from 2008 to today, and 80% from 2000 levels. What’s more, Border Patrol officers have doubled in size since 2004.  [cont'd.]

But don’t think that the militarization of the border will go away, even with National Guard troops leaving the picture. As the release says, the remaining troops will “support the border mission in the air.” That includes, according to DHS, “adding a number of new multi-purpose aerial assets” that carry the “latest surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.” Or, if you prefer, drones:

This is the semi-covert cutting edge of homeland security, where federal law enforcement authorities are rapidly expanding a military-style unmanned aerial reconnaissance operation along the U.S.-Mexico border — a region that privacy watchdogs say includes a lot of American back yards.

Fans of the Predators say the $20 million aircraft are a perfect platform to keep a watchful eye on America’s rugged borders, but critics say the drones are expensive, invasive and finicky toys that have done little — compared with what Border Patrol agents do on the ground — to stem the flow of illegal crossers, drug smugglers or terrorists.

Much like the rest of our military commitments, we are moving from a manpower-intensive mission to a secret, off-books, robot war mission, with unmanned aerial vehicles dominating. We’ve already heard about the increasing use of drones on US soil to aid law enforcement, so drones on the border was a logical and expected step. That doesn’t make it particularly appealing.

Arizona immigration protest (Creative Commons/SEIU International)

It’s not often that human rights and business profits line up on the same side of a political debate, but Alabama is a special place. The Cotton State was not only ground zero for some of the worst abuses under Jim Crow; it was also the flashpoint for early struggles that fused economic empowerment with civil rights, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Today, Alabama is once again a focal point for racial and class struggles, ignited by an anti-immigrant law that tests our definitions of economic citizenship in a world of fluid borders.

The law, HB 56, mirrors many of the “copycat” anti-immigrant bills that have gone viral in state legislatures from Arizona to Indiana. It would impose onerous identification requirements that encourage police to arrest and detain anyone who couldn’t present the right papers. Although some of the harsher provisions were blocked by a federal court earlier this year, the legislation (signed into law in June) still threatens to further demonize immigrants and to crystallize the racist ideology driving a two-tier economy, where the privileges of the elite are subsidized by the vicious exploitation of the 99 percent.

Sadly, if the law were only a matter of shamelessly scapegoating a group of vulnerable newcomers, the law might face considerably less opposition. But the debate reveals a convoluted class-based political calculus: employers contend that draconian anti-immigrant policies could cripple the economy.

They do have a point: Getting rid of the state’s undocumented population—2.5 percent of the state, according to the Center for American Progress–wouldn’t translate into more jobs for native-born workers or immigrants with green cards. It would likely shred the already-impoverished state’s balance sheet: [cont'd.]

$40 million—A conservative estimate of how much Alabama’s economy would contract if only 10,000 undocumented immigrants stopped working in the state as a result of H.B. 56.

$130 million—The amount Alabama’s undocumented immigrants paid in taxes in 2010. These include state and local, income, property, and consumption taxes. This revenue would be lost if H.B. 56 were to do its job and drive all unauthorized immigrants from the state.

$300,000—The amount one farmer, Chad Smith of Smith Farms, estimates he has lost because of labor shortages in the wake of H.B. 56. Another farmer, Brian Cash of K&B Farm, estimates that he lost $100,000 in one single month because of the law.

This projected economic consequences (not to mention the cost of implementing and enforcing the law) would only exacerbate the state’s economic turmoil: nearly one in five in Alabama live in poverty and unemployment hovers well above the nationwide rate.

The impacts of HB 56 could span across immigrants’ communities, disrupting the education of their children and subjecting even workers with papers to mistreatement and discrimination by police as well as neighbors.

Even though economic anxieties are fueling the anti-immigrant crackdown, economic concerns also inform the widening opposition. Some pro-business advocates complain that the loss of migrant labor hurts their bottom line, often because others don’t step up to fill backbreaking jobs like tomato picking.

But here’s where the political landscape may slip dangerously in a direction that counters the very principles on which activists are fighting the law. Suddenly the case for a more lenient policy toward “illegal aliens” is not that they’re vital members of their families, communities, unions and workplaces, or that immigration agents shouldn’t be campaigning to tear apart families, or that everyone has a right to due process, or that democracy in a pluralistic society hinges on equality before the law. If you listen to the bosses with whom civil rights groups have formed an uneasy alliance, HB 56 is bad for Alabama not so much because it criminalizes people who want nothing more than to make a living for themselves, free of the oppression of an arbitrary and dysfunctional legal regime.

Instead, it’s harmful because it’s bad for business.

But while the strange-bedfellows strategy may be politically expedient, the opposition to Alabama’s anti-immigrant law can’t be centered on a narrow calculus that elevates capital above human rights. The Obama administration, too, has challenged immigration policies in Alabama and Arizona on anti-discrimination grounds, but overall, the White House has perpetuated the rampant abuses that plague the federal detention and deportation system.

And the deeper labor issues manifested by the immigration crisis wouldn’t go away if the law were defeated: there would still be no national discussion on combating wage theft, human trafficking, and restrictions on the right to organize–problems that affect native-born and immigrants alike.

Marisa Franco of the National Day Labor Organizing Network told In These Times:

Workers are increasingly facing situations where their bosses and even customers or clients feel the authority to threaten and harass with little recourse of justice. When local police take a mandate to enforce federal immigration laws, employers have a powerful tool to undermine hard won labor protections. Its a threat to all workers and the fundamental right to organize.

The only way to reorient the dialogue toward rights and away from profits is to help workers and organized labor understand that the zero-sum game of “competition” for the most degrading jobs keeps the economically disenfranchised divided along false lines of “legal” versus “illegal.”

For now, activists may form strategic alliances to fight anti-immigrant bills like Alabama’s. But if they let bosses and big business frame the debate going forward, they’ll lose the real battle—for economic justice for all.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (photo: studio08denver/flickr)

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz represents Southwest Ranches, Florida, which has been at the epicenter of a debate over a proposed immigration detention facility. Residents of the town have consistently demonstrated their opposition to the facility, which they feel was designed and planned without much public knowledge of the proceedings.

Basically, they think they have been fleeced by CCA, who hopes to build the facility on land it already owns, into having a detention center that they fear will lower property values and present a risk to public safety.

Unfortunately, they’ve got a pretty poor representative in Ms. Wasserman, who’s basically taking a “lesser of available evils” approach. She initially called a town hall meeting to allow residents to voice their opposition and learn more about the project. After more than 250 people showed up to let CCA and the town council know they didn’t want a private prison, Wasserman, who had called the meeting, decided she would support the project. She now thinks it’s a good idea and that the town should move forward, saying she thinks “it is going to be far better to have that ICE detention center there than to have any other facility that would have a much more negative impact on residents there.” Other than a lead paint producing puppy mill, I can’t really imagine what would be worse for a community than a privately operated, for-profit human rights violations incubator. But there’s no chance she could have been partially swayed by the nearly $20 million CCA has spent lobbying the federal government over the past decade. Right?