A Day Without a Mexican

That giant sucking sound was the brains of 42 Democrats vanishing into lala land. That's how many (so far) who have sponsored H.R. 4088, the "Save America with Verification and Enforcement Act" (SAVE), introduced by Heath Shuler (D-NC) and Brian Bilbray (R-CA).

"SAVE" would sanction employers who hire undocumented migrant workers, require them to verify hires using the controversial E-Verify program, add 8,000 new border patrol agents, and expand the investigation capabilities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, among other things. (New rule: No more BS legislation titles.)

If Kos is correct, almost as bad is word that "centrist" Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Rahm Emmanuel (D-IL) is quietly pushing House Democrats to sign on to this darling of uber-nativists Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and Duncan Hunter (R-CA).

One, as Kos has been commenting all week, Republicans found out in Virginia's election outcomes on Tuesday that hard-line anti-immigrant posturing isn't turning out to be the magic bullet they thought it would be. Why, then, would Democrats now decide to drape themselves with the white sheet? I guess because we have an unmatched genius for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Two, this big brother of Arizona's Employer Sanctions law, due to take effect in January 2008, suffers from many of the same "circle the wagons and fire" notions of our home-grown measure. The main one is that nobody knows exactly what percent of the GDP is contributed by undocumented workers, but study after study tells us that they give more to local economies than they take from them. If that's the case, removing them from employer payrolls is going to bring bad things to life, starting with crippling the employers who presently engage them. How is that helpful? If the assumption is that all those middle managers, programmers, and technical support personnel whose jobs have gone to India are going to become busboys, construction workers, dishwashers, and fruit pickers, well, HELL-BLOODY-O????

Three, let's pause a moment in reverent gratitude for all who understand the velocity of money theory. It notes that each dollar dropped into a local economy circulates through it many times. See, that's why cities love it when conventions come to town. It's not just the hotel fees and restaurant patronage. It's not just rental cars and the parking lots and the gasoline and the taxi services and the night club and entertainment tabs and, oh, the liquor, or the souvenirs and T-shirts and the airport traffic. It's all that AND this: Every one of THOSE dollars cycles back through consumer world, generating ever more sales taxes and ever more capacity for local folk to buy or rent houses, remodel, get new clothes for the kiddies, get groceries, have clothes cleaned, grab a Tecate, have the carpets cleaned. . . .

So why would any Democrat, especially in this market, intentionally grow the ranks of the unemployed? Why would anybody voluntarily subtract X dollars from the national economy? Why would anybody shut down viable businesses, add X million people to the detention/deportation rolls, fracture their families, do physical violence to them, ensure lasting psychological damage among them, give legs to racist impulses, and, oh yeah, alienate their votes? Have we had a collective breakdown here?

Four, and by the way, the E-Verify program is full of errors, and word here is that our Employer Sanctions law, at least, will probably be found unconstitutional. Could that be a clue?

Five, supporters believe that Latinos will self-deport in anticipation of the law's taking effect. That's begun to happen here in Maricopa County, and one result is that public schools are seeing their operating budgets tank in tandem with enrollment declines. Oh Yah-hoodley-hoo! Great public policy! (Unless, of course, you subscribe to the shock doctrine school of shakedown government, in which case you think it really is great public policy.)

Six, employers aren't thrilled. We know that because the US Chamber tells us so, and because here in Phoenix, it's a small big cowtown where people talk with each other.

See, if I were running the DCCC, I would look upon that fact as offering an opportunity to make alliance with employers in order to push for safeguards against exploitation and abuse, in order to begin the long-term effort to instill a commitment to a healthy workplace ecology--meaning equitable treatment of workers and owners. But I'm not.

Seven, measures like these are racist, mean, ugly, and a form of terrorism. If you think not, put yourself in the place of an immigrant who's been here for 9 years, with family and a hopeful life, working hard and paying federal and state taxes and FICA. It disgusts me that my country is capable of this kind of law-making, and appalls me that my party is complicit. Complicit in this just as in condoning the use of torture. I'm one hair away from becoming an Independent. It doesn't seem to do any good to write, call, fax, and otherwise express my outrage to the numbskulls and chair warmers that presume to "represent" me in Congress. I am beyond furious.

I just called the DCCC at 202-863-1500. You're asked for the extension of the person you're calling. I punched in 100 just for the heck of it, and got Charlie Rangel's voice mail. I wish I could say that the message I left him was eloquent and coherent, and so will he, I'm sure, but I think he got the gist that I'm really unhappy at the racist, stupid, moribund turns my party persists in taking.

Give 'em a buzz and let them know your feelings, too.

It's not Immigration. It's the Economy.

To control the immigration debate, the Right has constructed a box made of the same-old, same-old tried-and-failed reactionary memes, and all of us are trapped within it.

Have you noticed? We never, ever seem to talk outside that box. Even when we seek to rebut, we repeat the memes and reinforce them in the public mind.

Individually and collectively, these sound bites are nothing but voter registration and privatization enhancement devices. That’s it. They have no basis in reality because that’s not the point. The point is to obscure reality, not reveal it. The point is to create a new reality and marshal the masses to defend it.

Observe the trap. Every one of the handful of popular immigration disinformation nuggets is designed to hook, recruit, and redirect the attention of one or more vulnerable sectors of the public. The disgruntled, the fearful, the racist, the desperate, and/or the bankrupt and the medically besieged have to be distracted from reality, captured for the Republican Party, and given a pressure valve, a scapegoat to shoot at. Ergo, “illegals.”

It’s no accident that Lou Dobbs--voice of the populist Right--commiserates with the middle class while he pumps far Right propaganda to the masses: Elections aren’t won without the middle class. So far, thanks largely to his megaphone, we either lamely rebut the memes (a lost cause; you can’t prove a negative), or we sit on the sidelines, frightened ourselves or frozen between false polarities like opposing labor or opposing immigrants.

But today's election results in Virginia and elesewhere, and the economic trends highlighted in today’s Financial Times may point the way for a whole new conversation. It turns out that voters are not driven as one to the GOP by immigration after all. It turns out that after a long post-traumatic stress disorder coma, Americans are waking to the real dimensions of the disaster the Right has wrought. Let's hope the Democrats wake up and smell the anger.

Meanwhile, indeed there are real considerations to be faced in the complex immigration issue, but we're trapped in a GOP sound chamber and missing the facts pretty much entirely.

Here’s my take on some of the memes, who they target, and how they function.

“Illegals” steal jobs and force down wages. There are millions of underpaid and un-benefitted “union orphans” and unemployed workers stranded on our shores waving adieu at jobs gone overseas and wages depressed by the GOP wealth transfer machine. How better to channel their rage than by telling them that a horde of brown people is stampeding across the land to steal their jobs? The sheer beauty of it! This meme positions the Right as the outraged friend of the workin’ man, and polarizes African Americans and Latinos. It also puts rotten rock liberals, who acquired their political values from a bumper sticker, between a rock and a hard place: Oh Lordy! Whom to support when the union people are fighting with the Black people! God forbid we question the premise.

“Illegals” steal elections. So many corruptions beset us, but undocumented workers lining up to vote is not among them. Still, this meme is perfect cover for Rightwingers who want to diddle state voter registration rules and tweak those little black boxes. It hooks the racism in us all, and drives a lot of Americans to the polls to support “voter fraud” propositions that actually are intended to defraud minorities, not to un-fix fixed votes. Heightened ID requirements and other measures are designed to keep poor people and minorities from voting, but under cover of “voter fraud,” GOP secretaries of state and tainted highway patrolmen get away with tricks that ordinarily would land them in jail.

“Illegals" bring crime to the neighborhood. "Illegals" drive down property values.” How many people who’ve played by the rules actually haven’t gotten where they expected to be? Hard work hasn’t automatically brought the American Dream—not since the 1970s, not since corporations took health insurance and pensions off the table and gave 99% of the productivity yield to the CEO.

More recently, millions were prodded to seize lowered mortgage interest rates, but weren’t told that their lenders were giving kickbacks for higher home appraisals. Now that house values are tanking and crime driven by poverty and drugs is rising across the country, a lot of furious people want something more tangible to smack down than Countrywide’s voice mail hell, and a lot of corporate lobbyists, drug dealers, and mortgage raiders desperately need the GOP to divert them.

They’re nothin’ but a bunch of "illegals!” This meme of perverted genius is the cinder-like heart of Rightwing xenophobia and racism. It reduces a whole person—a human being with a name, a family, a story, and a dream—to one word, a word that acts to numb us to the huge difference between what is merely legal and what is just. As cleverly, that word points us away from our own complicity: It was we who allowed our politicians to create NAFTA and CAFTA, and it is we who benefit from prices that are subsidized on the backs of the very people we demonize. Nice. But as long as we focus on those “illegals,” we aren’t likely to focus on NAFTA and CAFTA or global warming. It’s old-fashioned rabble-rousing; if nothing else can get the rabble pissed off and to the polls, the vision of thieving brown hordes and cowboy militias surely will. This is class war, only, as “employer sanctions” measures are about to demonstrate graphically, we’re shooting each other.\

“Illegals" don't pay taxes. Not exactly. The fact is that working Americans are funding the war, the country, and wealthy Republicans, who simply are not carrying their weight. But taxes are always a sore point. Paint the Democrats as tax raisers and friends of dirt-poor free-loading "tax cheaters," and paint the GOP as the party of law and order. Like the “illegals” meme, the tax meme appeals to the dutiful, unassuming law abiding voters among us—the so called “moral majority.” They may be God-fearing, but all the same, somehow they aren’t part of the new GOP aristocracy. Like the rest of us, they may wonder where the money went. Better to vote righteous indignation than to consider the possibility that they’ve been had, bad, by King George II.

“Illegals" have driven our hospitals into the ground and shred our safety nets and public schools. Somebody has, that’s for sure, but not brown-skin immigrants. For-profit hospital corporations like that owned by the Frist family shut down small rural hospitals to drive down costs. Right-wing fundamentalists attack school funding in favor of privatization—charter schools, private schools, and school voucher programs--and in favor of curriculum control through coordinated home and private Christian schooling. Neo-Con Republicans un-fund New Deal federal safety nets in the name of privatization or small government (except in Iraq), and shift social service costs to already overburdened states. We may notice that the lynchpins of the New Deal lie in tatters, but it’s hard to see clauses buried deep in government funding bills. Besides, it’s easier to gratify the dispossessed if we put fences militias on the border. It’s also more profitable to build private mercenary armies, private prisons, and miles of walls than tend to the nation’s social and physical infrastructure.

The debate as it is currently constructed really isn't about immigration. That's just the screen. It's the subtext that is controlling us. Time for us to get out of the box, look at the facts about immigration, and notice that loud crashing sound around us.

It's our disintegrating country, thanks to the GOP. This is what the Virginia voters are waking up to. And Rahm Emmanuel, James Carville, and Hillary Clinton are dead wrong to steer the party away from telling it like it is.