University of North Texas Students Use Immigration as a Wedge Issue

I am bored with conservative tactics and exasperated with the public's predictable tendency to get sucked in by them time after time. This observation is brought on by an on-campus demonstration at the University of North Texas.

The astute chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) held a "Capture an Illegal Immigrant Day" on campus in January of this year. The exercise involved students (presumably YCT members) posing as illegal immigrants wearing t-shirts that said "Illegal Immigrant" on the front and "Catch me if U can" on the back. To participate in the round-up of human beings, students had to sign up to receive literature and a badge from YCT. In exchange for bringing in the poseurs, the students received a candy bar. Brilliant. Charming. Subtle. Yawn.

Illegal immigration is a classic wedge issue. As such, it separates us (legal citizens) from them (perceived--all brown people aren't here illegally and all white people are not citizens--illegal immigrants). Wedge issues are easy emotional distractions, drawing the focus away from debate about the real causes of, and solutions to, difficult problems facing the nation.

The YCT students blame illegal immigrants for rising unemployment among citizens. The Bureau of Labor statistics reported that the number of unemployed persons for the month of February 2005 was eight million. If we are to entertain the notion that illegal immigrants are responsible for even a small fraction of the US unemployment rate, we have to focus on the kinds of jobs that illegal immigrants are able to obtain: farm workers, pool cleaners, delivery men, gardeners, dishwashers, busboys, domestic workers and some nannies. Lack of these jobs is not driving unemployment. In fact, when was the last time you heard about a riot at an agricultural concern in Central California because Americans couldn't get jobs picking strawberries or grapes? Or forget the riots, that's too dramatic. When was the last time you read an article or a saw a news story about down-and-out Americans who couldn't get jobs as dishwashers because of all the competition from illegal immigrants?

I did, however, read an article in the March 18, 2005 New York Times entitled "Wal-Mart Settles Illegal Immigrant Case". Wal-Mart has paid $11 million to the federal government after allegations that its janitoial contractors routinely hired illegal immigrants to clean 60 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states. The contractors would often make the workers work seven days or nights a week without pay and without compensation for injury. The immigrants were locked in the stores to keep them from escaping. At least 250 immigrants were used in this way. They were from the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Mongolia, Brazil and Mexico. With those immigrants out of the way, there are at least 250 slots open for good American citizens, right? Wrong. Because Americans would have to be given some kind of financial compensation for their labor and because they would likely have trouble with being falsely imprisoned in their place of employment for seven days a week, there will only be 25 paying jobs available. Please send your applications to ican'tbelieveyouareblamingimmigrantsandnotwalmartforthisshamefulexploitionoflabor.com.

By contrast, the jobs that skilled American workers are losing are not going to immigrants at all. They are going to people who are well-educated legal citizens of their own countries who can handle a call center or program software at least as well as their American counterparts for about half the cost. Late last year, there was a lot of discussion in the news about companies sending what were once lucrative jobs for Americans overseas to their capable and less-costly counterparts. Those stories faded as companies became more and more very sensitive about the bad press.

In response to the exodus of American jobs, President Bush suggested that Americans needed to be "re-tooled" to be productive in the evolving global economy. The re-tooling would take place through training and continuing education programs for adults. Of course, the federal government has been drained of funds by draconian tax cuts and the prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so don't look for the government to provide any funds for training Americans for the modern economy. I'll bet Merrill Lynch and the rest of the private sector won't be setting up re-training centers either. The Americans that the YCT members are trying to protect are being victimized by policies of a conservative administration that has focused on foreign policy and unnecessary tax cuts to the detriment of the American economy. Lack of vision and commitment, not illegal immigrants, are to blame.

YCT students should be pressuring the President to make good on his stated goals. Why are they wasting time yelping about illegal immigration? If we could snap our fingers and make all of the illegal immigrants disappear at once, not one middle class job that was lost would be replaced. And, until I see some empirical data supporting the assertion that American citizens cannot get lower skilled jobs because illegal immigrants are taking them all, I will not allow obfuscating forces to throw up smokescreens that distract attention from the real causes of real problems that are vexing our nation.

Instead of embarking on witch hunts against illegal immigrants, we should be engaging in hard dialogue about how to position American workers, with their high and expensive standard of living, for success in the emerging global economy. Blaming illegal immigrants for rising U.S. unemployment is an intellectually flaccid cop-out. We should expect better from our students, and we should demand better from our leaders.

The Legal Profession: Unnecessary Roughness

Warning: The following is a personal musing, not an article on a civil rights-related topic.

I have always been attracted to instances that display man’s inhumanity to man. No matter how many times I have seen them before, I am repeatedly spellbound by the documentaries that play every other hour on A&E and the History Channel that detail the calculated horror of the Holocaust. I watch documentaries and movies on slavery, Jim Crow and assorted genocides all over the world throughout history with a morbid fascination. Oppression, atrocities and the victims’ fight back from the brink of destruction are addictive. I cannot turn my head from a train crash. And now, I work in a “BIGLAW” law firm. In the corporate department, which is supposed to be the more amenable, friendly practice in comparison to its adversarial cousin, litigation, I am a frequent witness to and a participant in, senseless, heinous acts of wanton verbal violence: lawyers and clients turning rabidly on each other in a purposeless quest to vent, relieve stress, establish domination, seek revenge and pass on a legacy of cruelty to the new crop of lawyers. Charming.

I have been asking myself how I, one who considers herself a lover of justice and good relations, ended up in a profession that puts such a premium on meanness for the sake of itself. But then I remembered how I sat, almost hypnotized, watching “Mississippi Burning”, “Schindler’s List” and the latest PBS documentaries on slavery in America. I marveled afterwards at how humanity repeatedly claws itself out of the pit of its own baseness and I realized that somehow unbridled condescension and derision are the necessary predecessors of the evolution of the realization that it is inappropriate to for lawyers to treat each other worse than New Yorkers treat their dogs. Insistence on good relations and manners will spring from demands that the status quo is unacceptable. We don’t have to yell, we don’t have to be nasty; I am sure we can close deals without being hateful and boorish. I am sure cooperation would decrease the stress and create better outcomes for everyone involved. I even hear rumors that the legal profession is one of the few in which such unrestrained impoliteness is expected and accepted. I am sure that we can do better.

In seeking my own small sense of revenge, I am tempted to post the names of the awful, mean, horrible, no-good, gutterslime lawyers who have revealed their worst sides to me. But the change in culture has to start somewhere. So let it start with me.

Just as a point of clarification, this current culture of verbal violence does not reign merely in New York; my most recent experience with pointless disrespect was with an attorney in Tennessee. Rudeness in the law knows no bounds.

Oh Freedom: 40th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday

"Oh Freedom! Oh Freedom! Oh Freedom over me! And before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free!"

Those are the words to a freedom song (also a Negro spiritual) that members of the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other activists used to sing during civil rights marches and rallies. I never thought I would have the opportunity to sing those words along with the SNCC Singers, but there I was, standing in front of Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, singing and swaying with the original SNCC Singers, proclaiming my dedication to freedom. I could have died right there and had nary a complaint about the course of my life. However, if I had died then, I would have missed the chance, a few minutes later, to stand less than one foot away from Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King III as they passed through the crowd to address the rally. I would have missed being led in a call-and-response by Rev. Jesse Jackson. I would not have had the opportunity to tremble from excitement when Rev. Joseph Lowery put his arm around me to take a picture. And I would have protested being absent from the spot where Maxine Waters, Congresswoman from Los Angeles, California, publicly castigated Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and other conservative members of Congress for coming to Selma for a photo opportunity but voting against the interests of the poor and marginalized in Washington. It was glorious, y'all.

Shannon and I were in Selma, AL on March 6, 2005 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, so called because of the brutality unleashed upon 500 nonviolent marchers attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on their way to Montgomery. Civil rights luminaries turned out in force. In addition to the people I mentioned above, Rev. C.T. Vivian of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), Harry Belafonte (entertainer), Andrew Young (SCLC, former mayor of Atlanta), Diane Nash (SNCC), Charles Jones (SNCC), Ted Shaw, the Executive Director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Chuck D. of Public Enemy, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, Congressman John Lewis, Rev. James Bevel (SCLC), Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth (SCLC), the original SNCC Singers, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and Rev. Al Sharpton were all in attendance. They reflected the light from other civil rights veterans whose names we don't know but whose participation in the movement brought the country closer to its ideals. I met one such man, his name is Warren Harrison. He marched in Selma and was a resident of Resurrection City in Washington, D.C. as part of the Poor People's Campaign. Harrison is now a long-distance bus driver who lives in Michigan. Harrison is a hero, but he is also an inspiration and a reminder that a hero is just an ordinary person who takes a principled stand.

The original march from Selma to Montgomery was conceived by civil rights leaders after a 26 year-old black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, was killed by police officers when he was trying to protect his mother after a voting rights demonstration in nearby Marion, Alabama. When Jimmie arrived at the hospital he was still alive, but the hospital staff claimed to be out of blood and unable to give Jimmie a necessary transfusion. He died there. Martin Luther King and other leaders reasoned that a long march over the course of several days (90 miles) would give the people an outlet and a focal point for angry, frustrated emotions and would provide needed cooling off time to work through negative feelings engendered by the violence in Marion.

To get from Selma to Montgomery, the marchers would have to take Highway 80, the main thoroughfare in Selma. The Alabama River separates the town of Selma from the highway like a swift wide moat. A large, high arc of a bridge, called the Edmond Pettus Bridge, spans the river to allow passage for foot and automobile traffic. The arc of the bridge is particularly important because when a person is on one side of the bridge it is impossible to see over to the other side. When the marchers set out from Brown Chapel and First Baptist Church toward the foot of the bridge, they could not have known what was waiting for them on the other side. As they topped the crest of the bridge the solid blue line of mounted state troopers came into view. They continued marching and as they did, the troopers released tear gas and their billy clubs. They beat and kicked marchers who had tripped and fallen, or who had given in to the gas. One woman, Amelia Boynton Robinson, was beaten and left for dead. John Lewis, SNCC leader and now Congressman from Atlanta, Georgia, was beaten unconscious and also left for dead. News coverage of the violence was on televisions all over America that night.

The next day, King sent out a telegram inviting concerned Americans from all over the nation to come to Selma. Two of the people who came, Rev. James Reeb, a white Unitarian Universalist minister and Viola Liuzzo, a white Unitarian church member, wife, and mother of five from Detroit, were killed there. Rev. Reeb was attacked with a pipe by a group of white youths on the streets of Selma in broad daylight on March 9; he died of his injuries on March 11. On March 24, the night 25,000 marchers triumphantly entered Montgomery, Liuzzo was shot at point-blank range in her car by Klan members as she drove a fellow civil rights worker home along Highway 80 East. Covered in Liuzzo's blood, the passenger, Leroy Moton, played dead and survived the attack.

I often think of the Selma to Montgomery marches whenever discouragement over the state of civil or human rights sits heavily on my shoulders. And I remember that on their first attempt, the marchers were beaten and turned back. On their second attempt, because they were opposed by an injunction from the federal court, the only ally civil rights workers had, the marchers set out to the bridge, faced the state troopers, kneeled, prayed and turned around. At that point, their spirits must have been bordering on broken. But the federal injunction was finally cleared and on their third attempt, 3000 marchers walked right across that bridge, escorted and protected by their former tormentors. When they finished marching, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law quoting the words of a Negro spiritual, "We shall overcome."

As I sit, young, gifted and black (YG&B), up to my neck in rights and awash in opportunities, "thank you" feels like too paltry a term to express my gratitude for the courage and determination of those who came before. Therefore I will end this tribute with another song, the second verse of "Lift Every Voice and Sing", the Negro National Anthem:

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet,
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered;
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

I know we will get to Montgomery. Thank you for believing.