A national survey by the Pew Hispanic Center shows that by "a ratio of more than two-to-one (59% versus 27%), Latinos disapprove of the way the Obama administration is handling deportations of unauthorized immigrants." This should come as no surprise to anyone following Latino affairs under Obama. Unfortunately, Pew Hispanic's latest report reveals that "not all Latinos are aware that the Obama administration has stepped up deportations of unauthorized immigrants."
Slightly more than a third (36%) say the two administrations have deported about the same number of immigrants. And one-in-ten (10%) Latinos say the Obama administration has deported fewer unauthorized immigrants than the Bush administration.
In fact, Obama has overseen a 30% increase in deportations over the George W. Bush White House, up to nearly 400,000 during each of the last 2 years. In the first 6 months of 2011, la migra de Obama "deported more than 46,000 parents of U.S. citizen children." Furthermore, while an estimated 81% of illegals are Latino Americans, 97% of the deported have been brown men and brown women.
To recap --
Seizing on President Obama's failure to keep his campaign promises of comprehensive immigration reform, the Republican Party quickly moved to score political points with excitable bigots and chronically jobless white people. What began on Capitol Hill as an ordinary, baseless rally by both parties "to secure our nation's borders" by allocating multimillion dollar contracts in public funds to political allies through lucrative "defense" and construction contracts quickly mutated into a cowardly GOP chorus railing against children they called Anchor Babies. Soon the 14th Amendment was under fire and GOP buffoons and bigots at the state- and local-level were emboldened from sea to shining sea. First came SB1070, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer's wholesale rape of Latino civil rights for little more than "15 minutes" of political super-stardom and the usual multimillions of dollars in public funds for political allies. Now, 80% of Alabama's Latino children are absent from Alabama's schools from a year ago. Georgia's Latino exodus cost the state's agriculture sector an estimated $140 million last spring and summer as 11,080 farm jobs went unfilled. And a quiet and largely unquantifiable internal refugee crisis unfolds across America as undocumented millions of Latino Americans flee from the shadows to other shadows.
Mitt Romney's success this week in New Hampshire is a predictable lockstep closer to a 2012 election in which Latinos have no viable ally on the national ballot. This means Latino voters must decide for themselves which candidate to vote against. Obama failed us, sure, but his administration's sickening fondness for suddenly, permanently removing brown, Christian parents from the lives of their children is not just failure. It is cruelty. And when 97 of every 100 victims of Obama's deportations are Latino, it is not just a civil liberties issue. It is a hate crime. So it would behoove our Nobel Peace Prize President, who spoke so perfectly of "slaves and abolitionists" when he last applied for the job Latinos hired him to do, to revisit an unsympathetic truth Fredrick Douglas articulates thusly:
"The American people have this lesson to learn: that where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."
Follow Pablo Manriquez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mnrqz
Having been a single mom for most of my children's growing up, I decided to make a living while parenting my own four kids by fostering other children and members of the DD community. What I found is that we could only take on so many people with so many problems before the stability and well-being of our family system started to falter. I see this lesson as analogous to what is happening with the steadily growing number of illegal immigrants in this country. Eventually, the host community will inevitably suffer to the point where it does no one much good.
Take a look at the history of this country: for most of our 200 years as colonies, and 200 as a nation after that, we had NO immigration laws. If you made it over here, you were legal. Naturalization was only a little harder, easier than it is now, when over half the born citizens don't know history well enough to pass the citizenship test.
I am not claiming the moral high ground in any way. But I am a pragmatist and I don't think we can afford the extra resources that such a rapidly growing population will need. There is no good answer, mainly because to accommodate more folks, we actually have to get serious about sustainability. And at this point, we simply aren't doing it.
Until then, you're just Pablo and his 2 centavos. That doesn't make you wrong, oh thin-skinned one. It just doesn't lend credence to your opinions.
Thanks for playing.
It would behoove you to clean up your language and stop pretending your the spokesperson for an entire group of people.
If your argument cannot stand up on its own then improve your argument.
Remember the saying so popular among statisticians: "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'".
Pablo,
There will be no reasonable conversations or willingness to compromise until there is mutual respect for both sides. Sixty percent of American citizens are not "bigots and chronically jobless white people".
Please realize that the GOP's true attitudes were reflected earlier and quite loudly in their campaigns. Now they realize they need your vote, so the pandering has begun.
If their earlier words are anything to go by, the GOP basically hates you as much as they hate black Americans. They're only saying nice things to get your vote.
Obama, at least, has not been saying hateful things about people of Latino heritage. Yes, there have been a lot of deportations, but c'mon. People don't get rewarded for breaking the law, and you probably shouldn't vote for Mitt because this administration enforced the law.
It's a good start.
By what definition of "hate crime"? If you are implying disproportionate enforcement, consider:
"The [deportation] statistics are actually a little deceptive because what we've been doing is, with the stronger enforcement, we've been apprehending folks at the borders and sending them back," Obama told Latino reporters during an online discussion. "That is counted as a deportation, even though they may have only been held for a day or 48 hours (and) sent back."
Read more: http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/sdcounty/article_ea76f3af-f1ce-58e3-8646-e781f2417c5a.html#ixzz1jVRWX9gg
In other words, people apprehended at the border are now being lumped into the "removal" (or deportation) statistics. It just so happens that the vast majority of those illegally present are Latino. A high percentage of those deported being from that group does not mean that civil rights were violated. Should we not enforce immigration laws just because a large percentage are from a particular group and activists for that group don't want the law to apply to them? In America, we believe in equal treatment under law. Singling groups out for special treatment is offensive to our system of justice.
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/fischer/070322
By advocating for the dismantling of our borders and consequential decimation of our ecology, economy and institutions by way of unchecked population surges these Latinos curry no favor with America's legitimate citizenry.
...and my driver's license says MISSOURI, so my fellow "legitimate American citizenry" and I will "decimate" whatever American institutions we fund that require decimating. Viva Mexico, Armando.