I hope that the lessons, reflections, and connections stick. That L., the T.'s and others are people that I will see again. The weekend was a success. I think that besides race or gender, age is also an arbitrary designation. What if there were other means to distinguish how we all advance? What if rather than number of years on earth we could be promoted by the divine/spirit/energy? We could achieve certain levels of distinction by the way we think or treat others and ourselves? Because age and energy certainly do not correlate. I learned that this weekend. A learned soul could be four-and-a-half or 92. It just depends how you look at things. I wish to enhance my being by staying in tune with that information. I want to carry it like a satchel in my brain. To know that we never lose our own individual essence. And to know that we do have say or input on when we stop living our lives. And that among the living there are just as many dead and as living among the dead. It is all in the way you choose to look at things. I’m glad to keep advancing on this vision quest. Or should I say knowledge quest? I like the constant flow of changes to my beliefs and thoughts. I like searching for being above and beyond the pettiness those in power try to suppress us with.

I'm off...

to Annville, Pennsylvania. I signed up for the Friends Conference on Religion and Spirituality a couple weeks ago after I picked up the booklet before meeting one Sunday. I saw that the interest groups planned were congruent to my own spiritual interests and queries so I registered the next day. The deadline, in fact. (Serendipity says what? what?) This jaunt outside the city is long overdue.

Eugenia Last, you talkin' to me?

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Someone from your past can play a prominent role in your life today.

Today I received a classmates.com quicknote from my high school frenemy. Well we were mostly friends, but we definitely had our moments. Much of it was due to our school being a homogeneous environment where two girls from similar geographic, socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds inevitably had to outdo the other in order to be liked by (read: amuse) the cool kids and upperclassmen.

I'm not sure how prominent the role will be but considering the lengthy and complicated (as if there was such a thing as an uncomplicated high school thing) past we share, I'm pretty sure this'll stir up some of that lingering emotional detritus.

I sent a note back. Unless you subscribe to their site your choices are pretty wack. This is what I had to choose from:

Just wanted to say "hi." Drop me a note and let me know how you've been. (This is the one she sent me. I thought it'd be weird to reply with it, so I chose the last one.)

I'm so glad to see your name here—it's been too long. Send me a message!

Are you going to the reunion this year? Send me a note and let me know.

Hey, it's been a while! What's going on? Let's get back in touch. (But now I regret it. Whatever, it's done. No sense lamenting sent quicknotes. Ugh, I hate being a premature quicknoter...)

URGENT URGENT URGENT CALL YOUR SENATORS NOW!

URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT

Friends,

It is URGENT you contact Senators Hillary Clinton (http://clinton.senate.gov/contact/webform.cfm?subj=issue ; In DC Phone: (202) 224-4451), Chuck Schumer (http://schumer.senate.gov/SchumerWebsite/contact/webform.cfm; In DC: 202-224-6542) and any other senator from where you reside (see: http://www.senate.gov and click on "Senators" at the top left to find your senators' names and their offices' direct phone numbers.) to oppose the Senate bill 2611 the Hagel-Martinez-Specter compromise NOW. The bill, which is being voted on today, would among other things:

call for the deportation on undocumented immigrants
Establish a temporary worker program
Provisions like restricting due process to those accused of violating immigration laws would further erode the human and civil rights of immigrants.

You can see the complete text summary here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:SN02611:@@@D&summ2=m&


Republicans are pushing to add additional punitive enforcement provisions and further restrict access to citizenship, with few Democratic Senators standing up to them.

Yesterday by a vote of 83 to 16, the Senate voted to construct a 370-mile wall on the Southwest border. If Bush's proposals are incorporated, too, it will be a major victory for the far right.

Call them, email them, snail mail them anything just tell them that you oppose the so-call “Compromise,” that Senate B.2611 is no compromise at all.
Tell your Senators to remove the provisions from Senate Bill 2611 (the Hagel-Martinez-Specter compromise) that criminalize undocumented immigrants and restrict their rights and ability to gain citizenship.
Tell them to reject the Bush administration's proposals for sending National Guard troops to the border and new punitive enforcement provisions.
Instead of undermining civil rights and civil liberties, our elected officials should support real immigration reform that:
· increases the number of available family visas
· enables all undocumented immigrants within the U.S. to legalize their status and gain a path to citizenship
· provides due process, including restoration of access to the courts and meaningful judicial review for immigrants
· stops mandatory deportations and indefinite detentions
· allows undocumented immigrants and their families to remain together in this country
· protects the rights of both immigrant and native-born workers
If efforts to radically amend Senate Bill 2611 in a progressive, pro-immigrant direction do not succeed, it must be defeated.

Geez, does he work on commission?

"Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors for Border Control"

By ERIC LIPTON
Published: May 18, 2006, New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 17 — The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders.

Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan — like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment — the military contractors are zeroing in on the rivers, deserts, mountains and settled areas that separate Mexico and Canada from the United States.

It is a humbling acknowledgment that despite more than a decade of initiatives with macho-sounding names, like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso or Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego, the federal government has repeatedly failed on its own to gain control of the land borders.

Through its Secure Border Initiative, the Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders — a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success. It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers.

"This is an unusual invitation," the deputy secretary of homeland security, Michael Jackson, told contractors this year at an industry briefing, just before the bidding period for this new contract started. "We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."

The effort comes as the Senate voted Wednesday to add hundreds of miles of fencing along the border with Mexico. The measure would also prohibit illegal immigrants convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors from any chance at citizenship.

The high-tech plan being bid now has many skeptics, who say they have heard a similar refrain from the government before.

"We've been presented with expensive proposals for elaborate border technology that eventually have proven to be ineffective and wasteful," Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said at a hearing on the Secure Border Initiative program last month. "How is the S.B.I. not just another three-letter acronym for failure?"

President Bush, among others, said he was convinced that the government could get it right this time.
"We are launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history," Mr. Bush said in his speech from the Oval Office on Monday.

Under the initiative, the Department of Homeland Security and its Customs and Border Protection division will still be charged with patrolling the 6,000 miles of land borders.

The equipment these Border Patrol agents use, how and when they are dispatched to spots along the border, where the agents assemble the captured immigrants, how they process them and transport them — all these steps will now be scripted by the winning contractor, who could earn an estimated $2 billion over the next three to six years on the Secure Border job.

More Border Patrol agents are part of the answer. The Bush administration has committed to increasing the force from 11,500 to about 18,500 by the time the president leaves office in 2008. But simply spreading this army of agents out evenly along the border or extending fences in and around urban areas is not sufficient, officials said.

"Boots on the ground is not really enough," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday at a news conference that followed Mr. Bush's announcement to send as many as 6,000 National Guard troops to the border.

The tools of modern warfare must be brought to bear. That means devices like the Tethered Aerostat Radar, a helium-filled airship made for the Air Force by Lockheed Martin that is twice the size of the Goodyear Blimp. Attached to the ground by a cable, the airship can hover overhead and automatically monitor any movement night or day. (One downside: it cannot operate in high winds.)

Northrop Grumman is considering offering its Global Hawk, an unmanned aerial vehicle with a wingspan nearly as wide as a Boeing 737, that can snoop on movement along the border from heights of up to 65,000 feet, said Bruce Walker, a company executive.

Closer to earth, Northrop might deploy a fleet of much smaller, unmanned planes that could be launched from a truck, flying perhaps just above a group of already detected immigrants so it would be harder for them to scatter into the brush and disappear.

Raytheon has a package of sensor and video equipment used to protect troops in Iraq that monitors an area and uses software to identify suspicious objects automatically, analyzing and highlighting them even before anyone is sent to respond.

These same companies have delivered these technologies to the Pentagon, sometimes with uneven results.

Each of these giant contractors — Lockheed Martin alone employs 135,000 people and had $37.2 billion in sales last year, including an estimated $6 billion to the federal government — is teaming up with dozens of smaller companies that will provide everything from the automated cameras to backup energy supplies that will to keep this equipment running in the desert.

The companies have studied every mile of border, drafting detection and apprehension strategies that vary depending on the terrain. In a city, for example, an immigrant can disappear into a crowd in seconds, while agents might have hours to apprehend a group walking through the desert, as long as they can track their movement.

If the system works, Border Patrol agents will know before they encounter a group of intruders approximately how many people have crossed, how fast they are moving and even if they might be armed.

Without such information, said Kevin Stevens, a Border Patrol official, "we send more people than we need to deal with a situation that wasn't a significant threat," or, in a worst case, "we send fewer people than we need to deal with a significant threat, and we find ourselves outnumbered and outgunned."

The government's track record in the last decade in trying to buy cutting-edge technology to monitor the border — devices like video cameras, sensors and other tools that came at a cost of at least $425 million — is dismal.

Because of poor contract oversight, nearly half of video cameras ordered in the late 1990's did not work or were not installed. The ground sensors installed along the border frequently sounded alarms. But in 92 percent of the cases, they were sending out agents to respond to what turned out to be a passing wild animal, a train or other nuisances, according to a report late last year by the homeland security inspector general.

A more recent test with an unmanned aerial vehicle bought by the department got off to a similarly troubling start. The $6.8 million device, which has been used in the last year to patrol a 300-mile stretch of the Arizona border at night, crashed last month.

With Secure Border, at least five so-called system integrators — Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop, as well as Boeing and Ericsson — are expected to submit bids.

The winner, which is due to be selected before October, will not be given a specific dollar commitment. Instead, each package of equipment and management solutions the contractor offers will be evaluated and bought individually.

"We're not just going to say, 'Oh, this looks like some neat stuff, let's buy it and then put it on the border,' "Mr. Chertoff said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Skepticism persists. A total of $101 million is already available for the program. But on Wednesday, when the House Appropriations Committee moved to approve the Homeland Security Department's proposed $32.1 billion budget for 2007, it proposed withholding $25 million of $115 million allocated next year for the Secure Border contracting effort until the administration better defined its plans.

"Unless the department can show us exactly what we're buying, we won't fund it," Representative Rogers said. "We will not fund programs with false expectations."

Spring/summer semester-end seasonal sojourn starts...

F.'s the first to go. He leaves tomorrow and won't be back until mid-August.

It's the beginning of that transitional time when students and others start spreading out the five boroughs across the country and globe. I feel a little sad because it feels as if I'm getting left behind. This time last year I was in Europe; hanging out with S. in the French countryside. I haven't left since I returned from that trip. I suspect I have a little NYC-cabin fever. But I guess it's up to me to get out if I truly wanted to do so. It's hard to remember that though.

That's my thing, I think. I teeter between escapist fantasies and anchoring itches (my need to create a stable, secure, safe and static sense of stasis ... snore). It's a struggle. There's also that nutty thing I do where I imagine everyone else in the world partying it up on a beach without me. And everyone is wearing hawaiian shirts and/or gigham swimsuits, those 80s glasses that the Corey Feldman made famous, sipping frozen drinks...

Okay, obviously I have abandonment issues. I'm human. But this annual activity isn't my favorite. Not only do I not like being left, but I hate missing people. If I had a Dolorean I would go back to an era where moving entailed the construction of a new dwelling adjacent to your current one. A time period where travel took so long you actually forget about the person by the time they return.

I am looking forward to getting through my reading list though. Paperback traveller, indeed.

April 30, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Save a Tree, Don't Plant One
By WILLIAM ALEXANDER

IN case you missed it, Friday was a holiday — National Arbor Day [April 28th] — although in my opinion, calling a day with no white sales, no extended store hours and no Hallmark card, and which you celebrate by swinging a pickaxe for half a day, a "holiday" is a bit of a stretch. Still, before the weekend is over I will have dutifully planted a shrub in the rocky clay that masquerades as soil on my Hudson Valley property. Or, as my son once put it as he watched me plant a rose bush, "That's not gardening, Dad — that's mining."

Despite my affinity for this quaint tradition, I do wonder if Arbor Day has outlived its relevance, and if 21st-century America wouldn't be better served if the focus shifted from planting a tree to saving one, or a thousand.

Arbor Day originated in Nebraska in 1872, the brainchild of J. Sterling Morton, a journalist who, recently arrived from Michigan, was alarmed at the lack of trees on the plains. (Just think: if he had ignored Horace Greeley and gone east instead of west, we might be observing Woodcutting Day today.)

Some 90 years later, when I was 7, my father observed the spirit if not the letter of Arbor Day in his own fashion, taking me into some woods a few miles from our Roslyn home with a shovel and a roll of burlap. After walking for a while, we came upon a beautiful young dogwood, standing alone in a small clearing.

"This is it," my father proclaimed, as he started to dig. We wrapped the roots in burlap and dragged the tree out of the woods.

"Dad, whose property is this?" I asked repeatedly, but he avoided answering. "We're stealing a tree," I finally concluded.

"We're saving it," he replied, his face tight.

Within a few weeks, bulldozers had transformed what was left of the once glorious Mackay estate — which had boasted a 70-acre farm, formal gardens surrounding a Stanford White house and more than 500 acres of parkland — into first, 19th-century Nebraska, and then, 20th-century suburbia.

This made my father immensely sad, a sadness matched only by the pride he took in tending his little piece of the vanished estate. Our purloined white dogwood, the last living thing remaining from those magnificent grounds, stood in our front yard for many years, surviving even the man who saved it from the bulldozer.

My father's lawless but victimless act was the only way he knew to respond to what he viewed as a crime against nature. Four decades later, even though everyone complains about development, similar "crimes" are still occurring with alarming frequency. Fueled by rising home prices and population growth, bulldozers are threatening farms, orchards and tracts of scenic lands in New Jersey and New York and across the nation.

On this Arbor Day weekend, there are some simple things — more effective than planting a tree — that ordinary citizens can do to observe the spirit of the day. No. 1, stop complaining about the price of milk. It seems that every time the price of a gallon of milk goes up a dime, our elected officials — often the same ones who scream the loudest whenever a farm is turned into a housing development — go before a television camera to demand action (and garner a few votes).

Milk pricing is a complex issue, but the fact is, small dairy farms are vanishing at an alarming rate, and the ones that remain are struggling for survival. If you don't want your local farms to become housing developments, you need to accept the reality that milk prices are going to rise because dairy farmers need to make a living. You can't have it both ways.

For the same reason, buy local produce. This may be a challenge. But insist that your supermarket carry black-dirt onions and Long Island potatoes. In season, buy New Jersey tomatoes and Hudson Valley apples. Or, if one is available, join a local farm cooperative. Your participation in community-supported agriculture will reward you with a supply of farm-fresh, often organic vegetables and greens throughout the summer.

Make a contribution to a land trust. Your tax-deductible dollars will go a long way to saving a piece of land from development.

And finally, when you feel powerless, take a page out of my father's book and respond in the only way you know how. Even if it flaunts the law. But you didn't hear that from me.

William Alexander is the author of "The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden."

*Sigh* Everything's gonna A-OK

Stuff like this restores my pride in my fellow Americans and in humanity in general...

Colbert Roasts Bush

&

Improv Everywhere: Mission Best Buy

Here's an excerpt for the Improv Everywhere's sum-up:

We met at Union Square North at 3:30 PM. Around 80 agents showed up, most them looking like wonderful Best Buy employees. More than a few came dressed in navy or teal, but with the belt and the khakis they still looked employee-like. After everyone arrived I explained the mission. The first step was for everyone to throw their newspapers away. The instruction to bring a newspaper was a red herring meant to throw people off the scent of the mission's true nature. I then revealed the plan, "We're heading up to the Best Buy on 23rd Street. We'll enter the store one by one. Once inside, spread out and stand near the end of an aisle, facing away from the merchandise. Don't shop, but don't work either. If a customer comes up to you and asks you a question, be polite and help them if you know the answer. If anyone asks you if you work there, say no. If an employee asks you what you're doing, respond 'I'm waiting for my girlfriend/boyfriend who is shopping elsewhere in the store.' If they question you about your clothing, just explain that it's what you put on when you woke up this morning and you don't know any of the other people dressed like you."

There is something about this photo that has captivated me. It's from the April 1st immigrants' rights rally. C took it. It's my desktop background and everytime I start up my computer I say to myself that I want to change it, but I still have it up. I wonder if it's the barefeet on asphalt? Or maybe the strong calves and legs? The shadows? Or that I don't see his face and yet I, the viewer, am following him.

Mmmmmm. Back to normalcy.

I finished my 20-page final. Other course assignments were turned in.

Done.

Complete?

Not quite.

I still have to conduct my master's project in order to be officially finished. But the course work portion of my degree is complete. I worked the hardest I could and in the manner I saw fit. It may have not been pretty. Or efficient. But it never is. The good thing is that my journalism professor gave me valuable feedback. And I'll definitely find ways to improve.

I didn't get to attend the local Mayday actions though. But I obeyed the boycott. I stayed home; deeply engrossed in my paper. I only consumed cable internet and Con Ed. (Hey, a girl's gotta live.)

I'm looking forward to moving on. All of this forced last-minute writing has got me jazzed about working on newer things. I really want to do a World Cup-themed story. I also want to send around stuff I've written to see if I could muster up any interest. For now, it's finishing waking up (I slept until 11 a.m.), return library books and videos, and hit the gym. I'm goin' swimming!

Who done it? Will the guilty fund please stand up?

Gosh, ya donate to one or two non-for-profits and now everyone, from Planned Parenthood to Catholic Charities including my HS, undergrad, and graduate development offices, is hittin' me up for cash. Social cause solicitation is about 60 percent of my paper mail. I feel like I've created a tax-deductible monster or I unleashed the philanthropic beast. FYI: Bills, student loan consolidation offers, zero APR introductory credit cards, and the New Yorker (God bless the New Yorker) make up the other 40 percent.

Don't get me wrong, I was a Fresh Air Fund kid, my HS and alma mater were very generous with me, but gimme 15-20 years to get past the post-graduation/real world trauma, the soul-searching, graduate school, entry-level paychecks, and make a dent into my academic loans and I'll hook you up. But in the meantime, if I send you a check please, don't tell all your friends about me.

"Immigrants rights movement affecting African Americans"

By Karen Juanita Carrillo
Amsterdam News,
6 April 2006.

The nation's growing movement for immigrant rights is making some peopletake a second look at the current work and living conditions AfricanAmericans face.

With right-wing calls for deportation of immigrants, and amidst claims that immigrants are stealing jobs from U.S. citizens - which, in many cases means working class African Americans - some portions of the U.S.-born Black community have turned their anger at immigrants.

"But African Americans should join the immigrant rights movement. We're already part of it; we're intricately connected to it," claimed Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn). "We need to get our focus straight: Your enemyis not immigrants. Your enemy is white male domination, the white male power structure. What is stopping us from getting jobs is not immigrants. We should not settle for that divide-and-conquer tactic," added Baron, who is currently sponsoring the Voting Rights Restoration Act in New York City Council.

The Voting Rights Restoration Act would re-establish local voting rights for[legal] non-citizen immigrant residents who have lived in New York City formore than six months.

Barron points out that many of today's immigrants are from Africa and theWest Indies and that the current wave of immigrant fear could stem from the fact that so many immigrants are people of color.

"The problem is that the white power structure has more jobs than it shouldhave, and they have to be forced to open up opportunities for everyone," the councilman continued. "This was happening before immigrants came - beforethe Mexicans were here, we didn't have jobs, so don't fall for that storythat we were all happily employed before."

With a national budget of $2.7 trillion, a New York State budget of $112 billion and a New York City budget of $55.5 billion, Barron claims there's no reason for a lack of employment opportunities in this country.

"There are 2.3 million Black people in New York City and we're worried about some Mexicans?" he scoffed. "We'd better be worried about the Bloombergs and the Spitzers out there; those are the ones really affecting our lives!"

"I really believe that this whole issue brings up a larger question. It really reminds me of why we started the Black Radical Congress (BRC) in the first place. This is exactly the issue that emerged for us during the emergence of the move toward globalization. You have something like NAFTA[North American Free Trade Agreement], which disassembles the nature of workin a place like Mexico so that people have to find a way to feed themselvesand work and pay for their families," said Humberto Brown, a member of theBlack Radical Congress. "That leads them to come here, so now you have a situation where African Americans who have historically and today continue to be the most disadvantaged group in this 'wonderful' U.S. democracy, now they're faced with the question of whose rights should be fought for. Do labor rights, immigrant rights and the right to work supersede the rights of Black Americans? It's putting two oppressed groups, who are both victims of capitalism and globalization, against each other."

The immigrant rights movement is pressuring civil rights advocates to redefine what it means to be a citizen of any country, Brown added.

"Citizenship should not be defined by nation states anymore. Citizenship should be an element of your human rights - you're right to work, your rightto health care, and your right to stability and to a pension wherever you are living in the world. Since globalization has cheapened labor, it's corrupted the safety nets that so many countries used to offer. I think African Americans should join the immigrant rights marches to demand jobs for themselves, jobs for everybody. We should make sure that this economy works for everybody. It's a challenging issue, because we have to force global capitalism to provide equity for the people who produce its wealth. And that may be something it is unable to do," he said.

Included by permission of Amsterdam News. Voices C 2006, IPA, all rightsreserved.

The Merriam-Webster Word of the Day for April 16 is:
meliorism \MEE-lee-uh-riz-um\ noun: the belief that the world tends to improve and that humans can aid its betterment.

I love when the Word of the Days give me the precise words that match my current beliefs and thoughts. It's like a semantical-consciousness horoscope.

On Monday, I think I was waiting for there to be tumbleweeds rolling here in Queens. A "28 Days" sort-of thing. But no. Typical Monday. Cars to and fro on the Queens Blvd into Manjatan and out.

At home, I combed my apartment for a white shirt. Boy, was it difficult. I'm a New Yorker and plump Latina, who loves her colors. I ended up settling for sunglasses with white plastic frames for "peaceful visions," I told myself.

It was a little after four when I arrived at the rally. The corrals of protesters seemed like a carnaval. Flags, cheers, chants, costumes. Jesus, Mary, and the Romans. The Passion of the Inmigrantes. By this time the police were more permissive with pedestrian traffic than earlier, I learned. Yet at times, it seemed as if they were involved in a great, big game of human Tetris or Pacman: poring protesters of one corral into available space in another.

The morale of my protesting brethren was surprisingly pleasant considering it was almost hour three of the rally. Enthusiasm was channeled into shouting chants of "Bush escucha, la gente esta en la lucha." Maybe it was the Jesus with the cardboard cross or the constant standing, or simply the call-and-response but the march reminded me of a Catholic mass.

I left shortly after my hero Roger Toussaint spoke. I thought it was great that he still delivered a warm speech after having been sentenced to 10 days in jail earlier in the day.

That night and the morning after I realized that I took a souvenir with me from the march. I developed a cold! But it was worth it. I can only imagine the astonishment in Washington. Two million individuals coalesced to send lawmakers one huge check. A reality check, that is.

Hi everyone,
I'm asking you to email the News editor at the NYPost regarding a sentence in the article about my friend Julio, the artist killed by the drunken off-duty police officer a day ago. In the article: "Off-duty Cop in deadly DWI rap" http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/66154.htm, the third sentence says
"Colon then backed up and ran over the shutterbug again."

While my friend was an artist who was taking photos when the accident happened, the sentence trivializes Julio's death and is disrespectful to his friends and family. If you agree, please contact: Chris Shaw, Online Editorial and News, at: cshaw@nypost.com.

Immigration Debate Heats Up in Senate

by Norman Eng

March, 2006

The long-awaited immigration debate in the U.S. Senate is finally about to get underway. The next few weeks in the Senate will be crucial in determining how this country will treat the 11 million undocumented immigrants who have come in search of the American Dream but who lack legal status to live and work here. In the end, we’ll find out if we are capable of reforming the failing immigration system to manage migration flows better, and if we can do it in a way that treats immigrants fairly.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to begin working on sweeping immigration reform legislation in early March. Whatever bill emerges from that committee will then go to the full Senate for consideration and eventually a vote, most likely in April.

The stakes could not be higher for New York City, where an estimated half a million city residents live and work without legal immigration status, and many more are affected by family separation and immigration processing backlogs.

The Bush Plan
In order to understand the context of the Senate debate, it’s necessary to look at some of the major proposals on the table. In January 2004, President George W. Bush made the first of several speeches in which he called for stepped-up enforcement combined with a guestworker program that would offer temporary work visas to undocumented workers and workers from abroad.

The president’s plan pleased just about no one, however. Immigrant advocates criticized his guestworker plan because it would kick workers out of the country after six years and offer them no path to permanent residence and citizenship. Anti-immigrant restrictionists, meanwhile, labeled even this very limited guestworker program an “amnesty” that rewards lawbreakers.

The House Bill
In a few whirlwind days near the end of the session in December, House Republicans, led by Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, railroaded through to passage the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act (H.R. 4437).

The House bill (if approved by the Senate as well) would ratchet up border and interior enforcement and create severe new penalties for immigration violations. Unlawful presence –- when someone’s visa status expires, for example -– would no longer merely be a civil violation but would become a felony crime. Anyone who “assists” or “encourages” an undocumented immigrant to remain in the country could be sent to prison for five years –- a provision that has social workers, advocates, and others wondering if their work with undocumented populations is going to land them in jail if H.R. 4437 becomes law.

The enforcement-only approach taken by the House bill makes no attempt to deal realistically with the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country, other than to criminalize, arrest and deport as many of them as possible. Immigrant advocates insist that a more comprehensive and solution-oriented approach to fixing the broken U.S. immigration system is needed, and they have been riding on the hope that more moderate voices in the Senate will prevail.

The Senate Debate
A number of different immigration bills, all claiming to be comprehensive, have been introduced in the Senate, including a bill by Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy, and one by Senators John Cornyn and Jon Kyle. On February 23rd, however, Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released his “Chairman’s Mark,” a draft bill that ends the speculation about which bill would serve as the starting point for consideration of immigration reform in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Senator Specter’s draft bill attempts to cobble together a compromise from various existing proposals. The bill, to immigrant advocates’ dismay, incorporates many of the severe enforcement provisions from the Sensenbrenner House bill. Like the Bush plan, it would create a guestworker program to allow needed workers from abroad to spend up to six years working in the United States before being forced to return to their country of origin.

The bill’s treatment of undocumented workers constitutes perhaps the most strained compromise of all. Specter’s bill would grant temporary visas of indefinite duration to undocumented immigrants; the visa status would not expire after a certain number of years. However, there would be no specific path to permanent residence and citizenship for these workers. This provision basically creates millions of workers stuck in a permanent second-class status.

What -- And Who's -- Missing
Immigrant communities are protesting the Chairman’s Mark as falling far short of the basic principles needed for effective and realistic immigration reform, which include:

legalization and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already here
reunification of families separated by restrictive laws and bureaucratic delays

a temporary-worker program with full labor rights and a path to citizenship

smart, targeted enforcement

These compelling principles need more champions in Congress if we are to achieve a humane and workable immigration system. New York’s senators have been largely missing from the immigration debate so far. But Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton could make a crucial difference in the weeks ahead in avoiding a rush to a compromise position drawn from deeply flawed proposals.

Norman Eng, an immigration attorney, is communications and research coordinator with The New York Immigration Coalition. For more immigrant news, see The Citizen.

Hispanics New Target of Hate Groups

By BILL POOVEY,
Associated Press Writer Fri Jul 29, 2005 2:32 PM ET

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. - Organized hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan have historically terrorized blacks and Jews in the Southeast. But the recent influx of Hispanic immigrants to the region has given hate groups a new target, and officials say Hispanics are increasingly targets of hate crimes.

Former Klansman Daniel Schertz, a 27-year-old from the southeast Tennessee town of South Pittsburg, was indicted in June on charges of building pipe bombs to kill Hispanic immigrants.

Imperial Wizard Billy Jeffery of the North Georgia White Knights denied any connection to the bomb plot and said he banished Schertz from the group, but he readily admits he isn't happy with the flow of immigrants to the region."

The blacks fought for their civil rights. These illegal immigrants are coming in here and having everything just handed to them," Jeffery said.

Advocates say there are no precise statistics on hate crimes against Hispanics. Victims don't always call the police because of their precarious immigration status."People feel they will not be protected, and they are risking deportation," said John Bernstein, director of federal policy at the National Immigration Law Center in Washington. "That is more and more a problem with hate crimes."

Hate crimes against Hispanic immigrants have been common in other parts of the country, but Southern states saw their Hispanic populations boom in the 1990s. Arkansas' Hispanic population rose by 337 percent during the decade, Georgia's by 300 percent, Tennessee's by 278 percent and South Carolina's by 211 percent.

One of the first signs of organized anti-Hispanic activity in the South occurred in Gainesville, Ga., in 1998, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama group that tracks hate crimes.

The American Knights of the KKK held a rally on Hall County Courthouse steps, followed by a cross-burning in nearby Winder. A few years later, in 2001, the nation's largest neo-nazi organization, the National Alliance, staged a rally in Hall County.

Santos Aguilar of the Alianza Del Pueblo, an advocacy center for immigrants in Knoxville, said he believes the number of hate groups taking aim at immigrants continues to grow.

"The majority of the crimes are not reported to the law enforcement agencies," he said.

While a member of the North Georgia White Knights, Schertz was caught by an undercover federal agent and a confidential informant. Court records show he took them shopping for bomb materials at a home improvement store."

Once at Lowe's, Schertz picked out five end caps and some silicone for the pipe bombs he was making," the agent's affidavit says. He then explained how to wire the explosives.

After returning to a shed at his home, Schertz gave instructions "down to the proper order of laying gun powder and shrapnel material." He made five pipe bombs and sold them for $750, records show.

Schertz is charged with teaching and demonstrating how to make a weapon of mass destruction and interstate transport of explosive material with intent to kill or injure. He is being held without bond.

Schertz's attorney, Mike Caputo, declined to comment on the charges, but said he was working on a plea agreement. He said Schertz is a military veteran and has no previous criminal record.

His Klan leader, Jeffery, said Schertz was thrown out of the Klan for unrelated disobedience in mid-May — weeks after the alleged bomb making and selling in April.

"We kicked him out for breaking his oath that he swore before God," Jeffery, 43, said in a telephone interview. "We are not a violence-making group, and we don't believe in that. This isn't the '50s and '60s."

Federal agents say hate groups always deny involvement when one of their members is charged with a crime.

"There are always a percentage of these people who are ready, willing and able to go off," said James M. Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Nashville field division.

Cavanaugh said that "when the group burns the cross, worships under the swastika, you dehumanize the people ... that has been a plague on the world for centuries."

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report counted 762 active hate groups in the United States in 2004. South Carolina had the most, with 47, and Tennessee had the most Klan chapters, with 13.

David Lubell, director of the Nashville-based Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, said the Schertz case shows how supremacist talk can prompt violence.

"It is what happened in the civil rights movement. All of a sudden it is acceptable to incite hatred of immigrants, whether Latino, or from Africa, or Asia or wherever," he said.

Lubell said "usually it is a lone wolf kind of person who listens to these messages and acts on them ... This is just a symptom of what has been anti-immigrant sentiment, much more freely used by radio talk show hosts, anti-immigrant groups and even politicians."___

On the Minutemen

In the Shadow of the Minutemen

Sunday, February 26 2006 @ 06:00 PM PST
by Zach Morris, ARA

Their founders and spokesmen have appeared on CNN's Lou Dobbs, Fox News' Hannity & Colmes and chapters have popped up from Bisbee, Arizona to Fort Lee, New Jersey, but what few know about the anti-immigrant, vigilante Minuteman Project is their connection to violent white power groups.

Their founders and spokesmen have appeared on CNN's Lou Dobbs, Fox News' Hannity & Colmes and chapters have popped up from Bisbee, Arizona to Fort Lee, New Jersey, but what few know about the anti-immigrant, vigilante Minuteman Project is their connection to violent white power groups.

THE NEW THREAT
Founded by right-wing extremists Jim Gilchrist and Chris Simcox in April of 2005, the Minuteman Project ostensibly began as “a reminder to Americans that our nation was founded as a nation governed by the 'rule of law,' not by the whims of mobs of ILLEGAL [sic] aliens who endlessly stream across U.S. borders.” Vigilantes, many of them armed, pledged to keep watch on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexican border, to detain anyone crossing the border illegally from Mexico and to promptly notify the U.S. Border Patrol of their location. Instead, their patrols have either been covert vigilante actions of questionable legality (there has been talk of setting up “sniper posts” along the border on Minutemen web forums, coincidental to a series of at least nineteen “unexplained” murders of Latino immigrants, by gunshot wounds, in the Arizona and New Mexico deserts) or have been orchestrated media stunts aimed at whipping up racist, anti-Latino sentiment.Supporters say that they are simply helping over-taxed, under-powered law enforcement perform their duties under the Constitution, but critics contend this is nothing more than a veil to legitimize the actions of violent racist organizations.The Minuteman Project has since moved from the U.S.-Mexican border to recruitment throughout the United States, usually in areas with a large or growing Latino immigrant population far away from any international borders.

COMMON THREADS
Looking at the background and political affiliations of the Minuteman Project's leadership, as well as the activities of its membership, critics' claims are not surprising.56-year old Gilchrist, the Minuteman Project's director who once envisioned a future where America would be host to “neighborhood armies of 20 to 40 going out and killing and invading one another” if immigration continued, is also a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens and the California Coalition for Immigration Reform. Both organizations are considered hate groups: the Council of Conservative Citizens opposes “race-mixing” and has close links to the neo-fascist British National Party, while Barbara Coe, president of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, refers to Mexicans as “savages” and claims to have knowledge of a “secret plan” by the Mexican government to invade and annex the American Southwest.Simcox joined forces with Gilchrist only after suffering a mental breakdown in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on NYC. Initially restricting himself to bizarre answering machine messages that demanded the caller recite the preamble to the Constitution before leaving a message, he left his home and family in Los Angeles to embark on an anti-immigrant crusade. His ex-wife, Kate Dunbar, filed for sole custody of their child in late 2001, citing “sudden, violent fits of rage,” paranoid outbursts and instances of child abuse at the hands of Simcox. Organizationally, the idea of holding vigilante patrols of the southern border is not new: the Ku Klux Klan did it in the 1960's and called it the Ku Klux Klan Border patrol. Then in the 1980's, the KKK did it again and called themselves the Minutemen. The 1960's also saw the rise of right-wing terrorist group who called for the assassination of left-wing student and civil rights activists. Their founder was arrested after an armed bank robbery attempt in 1968. The name of this right-wing terrorist organization? The Minutemen. Go figure.

DISSENT WITHIN THE RANKS
Interestingly enough, the most jarring criticism of the current Minutemen does not just come from anti-racist activists, it also comes from within the Minutemen's own ranks.Self-described anti-immigration activist Jim Chase, founder of the California Border Watch group, publicly severed all ties with the Minuteman Project and other groups in November of 2005. Chase stated in his open letter to them: “You have murderers in your ranks. You have Nazis, other anti-Jews, and anti-Hispanic racists side by side with you. You are whom you run around with. Proud to be a Minuteman now? You may not be so proud in the future.”What Chase is referring to is the deep association of the Minutemen to racist groups. In April of 2005, during the Minutemen's border watch, a neo-Nazi group called the National Alliance flooded the border towns of Bisbee, Douglas and Nogales with racist literature calling for the extermination of all non-whites in support of the Minuteman Project's efforts. Members of White Revolution, the National Vanguard and other Nazi groups have been featured prominently at Minutemen recruitment events. Most blatantly, many Minuteman affiliated groups, such as California's Save Our State, now openly embrace white power fascist politics.The Minutemen also claim to be peaceful, yet encourage their members to engage in armed patrols. They have also engaged in violence. On May 25, 2005, Minuteman supporter Hal Netkin drove his van into a crowd of anti-racist protesters outside of a Minuteman rally in Garden Grove California, sending two people to the hospital. Yet, in public, Minutemen spokesmen continue to deny such accusations.

CALLING THE BLUFF ON A POKER FACE
Local activists from Anti-Racist Action and the One People's Project recently exposed the band Poker Face for its anti-Semitism, leading to a flurry of follow up articles in local New Jersey papers. Poker Face was scheduled to play the NJ Libertarian Party's annual convention at the University Inn at Rutgers University, but after residents, students and alumnae sent letters and phone calls of protest to the administration, Rutgers pulled the plug. Rutgers' officials denied the cancellation had anything to do with the allegations of anti-Semitism. Lead singer Paul Topete repeatedly denied being anti-Semitic in interviews to various newspapers while at the same time effectively denying that the Holocaust ever happened. Topete also denied being racist by stating that he was half-Mexican.Well, it just so happens that after Poker Face's Rutgers appearance was canceled, they managed to book another show at a conference held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. The conference just happened to be a recruitment meeting for a Pennsylvania chapter of the Minuteman Project, headed by John Ryan of Quakertown, PA. The conference was moved to that hotel after the management of the Valley Forge Convention Center canceled the Minutemen's event due to protests regarding the group's racist ties. Outside the conference, one attendee said to a protester holding a sign that read, The Minutemen are a Nazi Front: “Yes, we are, and proud of it!”

GROWING CONCERN, GROWING OPPOSITION
Despite being lauded by public figures such as CNN's Lou Dobbs, Fox's Sean Hannity and California Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar, there is growing opposition to the Minuteman Project, ranging from small community groups to national civil rights organizations and direct action oriented anti-racist activists. Yet all recognize the Minutemen for what they are, only a symptom of a much larger problem. While membership in racist organizations has declined over the past five years, the number of racist and anti-Semitic bias incidents has increased. Hysteria created by politicians and conservatives over national security issues, the so-called “Culture Wars” and the large influx of Latino immigrants is proving to be a volatile mix. Neo-Nazis have seized on this to incite violence against people of color, Jews, Muslims and homosexuals.

On February 25, the same day as the Minutemen conference in Pennsylvania, members of the swastika-armband clad National Socialist Movement attempted to march through a predominantly black neighborhood in Orlando, Florida. Others held rallies outside of Chicago. Additionally, the Minutemen held recruitment meetings in 43 cities nationwide that Saturday. Anti-racist and civil rights groups are gearing up for a long campaign to counter the shadow cast by organized racists. They vow to keep working until Americans realize that the only border the Minutemen are really interested in patrolling is the Mason-Dixon line. Until then, anti-racists will continue to be ready at a minute's notice to stand up against this new face of hate.

A few highlights from my week

Amy Goodman and Howard Zinn listening and looking on at Saturday's Quaker Arts Committee talk Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal.

Jupiter and Dannyboy's interpretation of Ying-Yang. Do you think they're dreaming about Taoism?

Leaving Sunnyside.

Manhattan had an ominous tinge to it today. The sky was full of gray cotton clouds. The overcast daylight made colors pop out of the multigrade shades of the sidewalks, asphalt and buildings. Then the gray cotton became a big public school blackboard. Yet no rain fell. I cut through Bryant Park to Fifth Avenue. The park looked like a school cafeteria after lunch. For every six chairs around a table there was one person seated. The green metal tables and chairs were positioned in a fashion that indicated many lunch encounters must've taken place earlier in the day. Some were paired off distanced from the rest. Others looked like co-worker chairs in a circle. Now they looked like those abandoned nests in the trees. I wonder about the birds who construct those nests. How long does it take to build one of them? Do both bird parents build it together? And how do they know how to make? Or that they even should build nests? I guess not all of them do because there are A LOT of pigeons here in the city. Each tree would be like pigeon apartment/birthing structure.