Irresponsible Immigration Legislation

Response from Latinos in Arizona: BOYCOTT ARIZONA!
By Eddie Griffin

Texans speak a different language than New York or Illinois. When people speak of Immigration, there are those who favor going in with jackboot, Gestapo-style, ICE SWAT team in search of people with Spanish surnames. They cannot distinguish between citizens and non-citizens; therefore, literally all Latinos must carry numerous forms of verifiable ID. This loss of Hispanic freedom suits some politicians well.

(February 11, 2008, “Political Beauty Contest in Texas (Part 2)” by Eddie G. Griffin, BASG)

We saw federal ICE troops go into Latino communities and into factories and drag out Spanish surname workers, detained them when they could not produce citizenship papers, incarcerated them in places where their family, friends, and lawyers could not find them. They separated husbands from wives, and left children stranded in their schools, crying for the parents. It put undue hardship upon the state to incarcerate, and then having to feed and support their legal families. Many had worked for years, earning paychecks, with regular payroll deduction, but no benefits there from, because they were not legal immigrants. The taxes they paid went for naught towards citizenship.

We remember the story of school teachers who were stranded with crying Latino elementary school children, with nowhere to go, because both parents working in the factory were locked up, and nobody knew where.

Then there was the American wife of an illegal working in the country with an expired “green card”. When he is locked up, she must appeal to the state for food and welfare.

Then there were the prisons built for illegal aliens, and prison cells for mothers and their babies.

This is the kind of ENFORCEMENT the state of Arizona is looking for. But instead of federal ICE SWAT troopers, it would be State Troopers conducting the raids. This is what The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act (SB1070) in Arizona is all about, supplanting federal authority by use of State Troopers to enforce current Immigration Laws.

Farmer Branch, Texas is spending millions of dollars fighting to enforce its own brand of Immigration legislative ordinances. There is another city in Pennsylvania with its own brand. And, so we have a chaotic trend with every state, every county, and every city writing its own Immigration Laws.

Response from Latinos in Arizona: BOYCOTT ARIZONA!

Candidate BARACK OBAMA: We need comprehensive immigration reform that creates a system that is fair, consistent, compassionate, and emphasizes both maintaining the rule of law and security of our borders while working to keep families together and putting the undocumented on an earned path to citizenship.

We also need to bring the 12 million undocumented immigrants out of the shadows. We need to be realistic about the fact that they are here, we can’t deport them, want they have become an integral part of our society. We need to give this population a chance to pay a fine, to have provisional status in the country, and to get into the back of the line for citizenship. (Response to 2007 NAACP survey)