Monday, September 27, 2021

The Democrat's "Plan B" for immigration reform: same old shell game

Sen. Bob Menendez and some others have floated trial balloons saying the Democrats "Plan B"  for some sort of concession to the immigrant rights movement in the Reconciliation Bill is updating the "Registry Date." 

'Registry' allows immigrants to get legal status 
The "Registry Date" was the mechanism used 100 years ago to straighten out the immigration papers of European immigrants. Basically it said if you had been here since before a given date, you should go tell the attorney general so he could just recognize you as being a permanent resident and give you a green card.

The measure was adopted in 1929, and it was meant to be, and essentially was, a statute of limitation on undocumented status. And over the decades, the date was updated several times ... until it stopped benefitting mostly Europeans.

So the last time the date was moved was as part of the misnamed Reagan "amnesty"  of the mid-1980s; and to this day it remains set in 1972, a half-century ago.

The proposal being floated now is for making 2010 the cutoff. That would in theory benefit a majority of the undocumented, but would not begin to redress the harm of the two-decade bipartisan persecution and  criminalization of immigrants.

There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of families that have been divided by the Bush-Obama-Trump and now --let's be honest-- Biden criminalization and deportation madness. A registry date change simply ignores the reality of the need to redress that damage.

So welcome as legalization of some --even many-- among the undocumented would be, it is no substitute for a real change in policy.

The Democrat's somewhat disingenuous argument for saying a registry date change fits in a budget reconciliation bill would be that it just updates a deadline for filing a petition for adjusting your status, a mere technicality but --oh happy coincidence!-- it would mean gizillions of dollars flowing into the government because of the filing fee for that petition. So, you see, this is mostly a budgetary measure to raise funds for the feds, like, say, increasing the luxury tax on imported perfume.

The obvious retort is that although disguised as a mere technical change in a deadline, this is in fact a humongous shift in immigration policy. So nice try, but no cigar.

What else should be noted is that the option of updating the registry date has been open since forever to supposedly pro-immigrant Democrats (and yes, to Republicans, too, when there were still some pretending to be pro-immigrant), and they never seriously considered putting it into any piece of must-pass legislation until now, when --oh so conveniently-- the Democrats can shift the blame for it being thrown out on an obscure, unelected official, the Senate parliamentarian. 

So until they prove otherwise, my response to the "Plan B" is that this is just one more three-card-monte con job and I say to Biden, Schumer, Pelosi and their ilk: you bastards, that is one more you owe us.

Sunday, August 15, 2021

Today was a good day: the fall of Kabul

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
                               -- T.S. Elliot

Everyone was surprised that Batista fled La Habana on New Year's Eve at the end of 1958. But also ...

  • The Shah, Teheran.
  • Somoza, Managua.
  • Ghani, Kabul. 

The rapidity with which the South Vietnamese position collapsed in 1975 was surprising to most American and South Vietnamese observers... For instance, a memo prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and U.S. Army Intelligence and published on 5 March indicated that South Vietnam could hold out through the current dry season—i.e., at least until 1976.      -- Wikipedia

That's what they said about Fidel and the Sandinistas, too. That bit about the dry season in Vietnam was essentially the sort of lie that the major media were parroting about Afghanistan even a couple of days ago. 

But the reality of post-WWII colonial occupations is this: the second most people in the country become convinced that the challenged client regime no longer has unstinting unconditional, unlimited, American backing, its collapse is a question of weeks. The precise timing depends on the skills and calculations of  the insurgents. 

That the puppet regime in Afghanistan would end like this was obvious months ago, with the first reports of rural districts (roughly equivalent to American counties) "falling" to the Taliban because the insurgents made the soldiers at government outposts an offer they couldn't refuse: if they surrendered their positions and weapons, they could simply walk away.

You say, "wait!" That isn't really an offer they couldn't refuse because they had the alternative to resist a Taliban advance. And precisely the point is the government soldiers did not see any reason to act as government soldiers once someone showed up asking, "are you the people fighting for the government?"

That's when I knew it would end like this, and said so publicly on Radio Migrante months ago. The timing, of course, I had no way of knowing, it simply depended on when the Taliban felt they were in a position to tap the house of cards so the structure would collapse. It turned out that was 9 days ago. The first provincial capitals "fell" to the Taliban August 6. On August 15, they talked into the presidential palace without resistance.

I guess one could say this is one more attempt by history to teach the American rulers that the age of colonialism ended with their victory in WWII. 

The American revolution was the first major anti-colonial revolution of the modern epoch, however immensely flawed (slavery of Blacks, genocide against the Indians, brutal exploitation of the immigrant proletariat from Europe). 

I guess it shows that as a supremely social species, we advance only grudgingly. and perhaps it is fitting that such a major anticolonial victory well into the 21st century should also certainly be flawed, as was the one that set the pattern by having its slave owning leaders proclaim that "all men are created equal," and, no, Jefferson didn't mean "and women too," (see: Sally Hemings).

To deny the victory over colonialism and imperialism that has just taken place because of "Islamo-fascism" and similar denunciations is to misunderstand how historical progress takes place, including that, in a lot of ways, it sucks. Just ask Washington's and Jefferson's slaves. But despite that, July 4, 1776, was a great day. 

And today, too, has been a good day, despite what is to follow.

Friday, March 26, 2021

You want COVID to be over? Make it so ...

Today, after a year of hiding at home, I went back to the Radio Migrante studio at the GLAHR offices to do a webcast show from there for the first time in a year. 

After a year of doing our daily "Todas las Voces" streaming show remotely, it was a liberating experience.

Radio Migrante
Radio Migrante 26-III-2021
Because of my age (I turn 70 in a couple of months) and pre-existing conditions (too many to list) I had been strongly advised to hide in the deepest cave I could find until COVID was over. Doing an internet streaming program in the second decade of the 21st Century made it possible, barely an inconvenience. My older brother (a distinguished college professor) once told me that Jean Paul Sartre had said that "hell is other people." An even worse hell is the one without other people. Even online, with video and audio and interactivity, it is not the same.

I volunteered for the vaccine trials (where half the participants get the real thing and half a placebo) out of cowardice: a 50% chance of protection is way better than 0% ... and trusting the vaccines likely would work.

In December I was was enrolled into the J&J trial, but a 50% chance of contracting a deadly disease ain't so good so I still stayed in my cave despite getting a shot.

Now that the main part of that trial has concluded, and the vaccine has been authorized, participants in the study were "unblinded" and a few days ago I was told that I had in fact received the vaccine last year and have been fully vaccinated for months.

So given that this vaccine --and all the others with detailed published trial results (and, yes, including Russian and Chinese shots)-- are (roughly) totally effective in preventing severe disease leading to hospitalization and possibly death, and after talking to medical folks, I decided that for me, COVID --or at least extreme COVID, hiding in a cave-- is over.

Today I spent more time just informally talking to people in person after the show than I have in a year. And yes, we kept our distance, and had masks much of the time when not eating. Still, it was liberating, exhilarating.

Our society as a whole, and the entire world, also needs to be liberated from this pandemic. That starts with the responsibility of everyone who has the privilege of being able to get vaccinated now to actually do so. And that means us, people in the United States, who have access to the world's biggest stash of shots. All the science suggests that the vaccines greatly reduce or block viral transmission. And that is what so-called "herd" --group-- immunity is about. But it only works if close to everyone is vaccinated.

Within a few weeks, it is likely that the United States is going to be awash in vaccines. In addition to the three already approved, the federal government has already bought enough shots of those three and other vaccines likely to be approved soon to cover the country's entire population two or three times over. Our responsibility is not to agonize over the ethics of being ahead of billions of people in Asia or Africa with access to the vaccines: right now we cannot fix that. Our responsibility is to bare the arm and receive the shots. That will set the stage for the fight to have all those "extra" doses we as a country have already bought to be shared so that the whole world --the entire human race-- can be protected. 

And not just our "extra" doses but as many more as can be produced in our country, and as many more as can be produced by sharing the technology and patents involved with everyone. Many other countries can produce vaccines. And all those than can should be doing so. Pharmaceutical profits be damned. 

And in our specific case, we should let our "last name" ... of America ... be our starting point. Let's truly be of America, and just as our government is doing for the population of the United States, if we want to show the world we are truly a great nation, the United States, working together with other countries of the Americas, should guarantee vaccines for all Americans --North, South or Central-- this very year. 

Sí se puede. Yes we can.

But the first step is for you to get vaccinated as soon as you possibly can. It is one more step towards freedom from COVID. And once we learn that together we can free ourselves from COVID, I think it pops the lid from the can on what together we can do..

Today I felt liberated. Let's make it so for our entire race, the human race, because while there is a soul still imprisoned or threatened by COVID, none of us will truly be free.