The Ghost of Prop 187 Continues to Haunt the GOPBy Michael Stafford | June 22nd, 2011 | 6 Comments
In 1994, California residents approved Proposition 187. The measure, supported by many California Republicans including then-Governor Pete Wilson, barred unauthorized immigrants from utilizing various social services, including public education.
Ultimately, a federal district court determined that Proposition 187 was unconstitutional. By then, however, the political damage had been done.
More: http://blog.cagle.com/2011/06/the-ghost-of-prop-187-continues-to-haunt-the-gop/
Following is a retrospective of my thoughts on immigration down through the last decade:
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Men Without a Country
by James Ottavio Castagnera, October 22, 2004
A 19th-century writer, Edward Everett Hale, once published a story called “The Man without a Country.” The protagonist is Philip Nolan, a young U.S. Army officer who unwisely deserted to join the ill-fated effort of Aaron Burr to establish an independent empire west of the Mississippi. In Hale’s yarn, during his court martial for treason Nolan shouts, “Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” The shocked presiding judge obliges, handing down the following sentence on September 23, 1807: “Prisoner, hear the sentence of the Court! The Court decides, subject to the approval of the President, that you never hear the name of the United States again.” And for the next half century Nolan lives out his life on board one U.S. Navy ship or another, never permitted to read an American newspaper or see his native soil — the man without a country.
Two hundred years later, life is emulating art. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court heard the appeal of Daniel Benitez, a 45-year-old Cuban immigrant, who has been held in federal custody since 2001. Benitez, a Cuban national, was among the thousands of “Mariel boat people” who sailed from that Cuban port in 1980, when Fidel Castro temporarily opened his island fiefdom to emigration.
Granted an immigration parole shortly after landing on a South Florida beach, Benitez was convicted of second-degree grand theft in 1983. When he was released from prison he applied for permanent residence in the United States. The Immigration and Naturalization Service denied his application on grounds of moral turpitude, citing the 1983 conviction. Benitez remained in migrant limbo until 1993, when he pled guilty in another Florida courtroom to a laundry list of felonies, including armed burglary and illegal possession of a firearm. The plea brought a 20-year sentence down on him.
This time around the INS ruled that continuation of Benitez’s immigration parole was “against the public interest.” And so the agency revoked it. In 2001 he was released into federal custody. The agency’s Cuban Review Panel at first found him releasable, when a suitable halfway house could sponsor him. But in 2003, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, a successor to the INS under the Department of Homeland Security, revoked the Notice of Releaseability, on the basis of an allegation of a planned escape from jail. USCIS reached this decision without a hearing. Bottom line: Benitez is an inadmissible alien so far as the United States is concerned.
Now here’s the catch: although Benitez is a native Cuban and still technically a Cuban citizen, Cuba, like Uncle Sam, wants no part of him. The Cuban government will not take him back. He is, quite literally, a man without a country.
Daniel Benitez is not the only immigrant enduring indefinite U.S. incarceration. The immigrant-advocacy group Human Rights First estimates that more than 2,000 “Philip Nolans” from around the world are in the same spot. And the federal courts are divided about how all these cases should be handled. Consequently, the Supreme Court consolidated two such cases from federal courts of appeals into Benitez v. Wallis. In an amicus curiae brief, Human Rights First, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch wrote,
No misuse of government power is more clearly established as a violation of international law than the practice of prolonged arbitrary detention. The right not to be unjustly detained, so central to our concept of ordered liberty, is articulated in the earliest documents on personal liberty as well as in the declarations, covenants, treaties, and constitutions that embody modern international law and the laws of free states. Indeed, the right is universally recognized among the democratic nations and among the international bodies that represent the nations of the world.
Nobody is suggesting that Daniel Benitez is a martyr or a saint. Like Hale’s Philip Nolan, he is a criminal whose ill-considered words and deeds made him deserving of punishment. But once having paid his debt to our society, should he languish in prison for another 20 or 30 years — at our expense, fellow taxpayers — because neither America nor Cuba wants him walking the streets?
In the overcrowded, underdeveloped world in which most members of our species struggle to survive, America remains what Thomas Jefferson called our country — the last, best hope of the world. Since 9/11, we are much more reluctant to play that role. But it’s one which we should not avoid. Benitez v. Wallis well may be a litmus test of how history will remember us. Will ours be the era in which America’s dedication to liberty, due process, and the rule of law were relegated to history’s dustbin for the sake of an illusory sense of security?
I hope not.
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James Ottavio Castagnera: The More Things Change ...
SOURCE: Lehighton Times-News (6-17-06)
[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the author of the weekly newspaper column “Attorney at Large.”]
Faithful readers (if any) of this column, who have followed my series --- on U.S. incursions into the Philippines (1899) and Iraq (2003); recurring oil crises; repetitive waves of illegal immigration; and the way the rich always seem to stay that way --- may be asking by now, “So what’s your point?”
Put simply, I’ve been impressed lately (as the title of the series implies) with how much --- despite a trebled population and stunning technological advances --- our America of 2006 resembles the U.S.A. of 1906 with regard to several of its most pressing social, political and economic problems. Even more to the point, I catch myself wondering whether this is a cause for comfort or concern.
Permit me to recap briefly.
As author Max Boot documents in his 2002 book The Savage Wars of Peace, American incursions have been more the rule than the exception throughout our nation’s history. For example:
The Barbary Coast (1801-05)
The Marquesas (1813)
China (1859)
Korea (1871)
Samoa (1899)
China, again (1900-41)
The Philippines (1899-02)
Latin America, assorted countries (1898-1935)
Russia (1918-20)
And, of course, Vietnam (1959-75). It was this latter, long and disastrous incursion that led to our current national aversion to future foreign military adventures. The Colin Powell Doctrine --- which was so successful in Panama and the Gulf War during the elder George Bush’s administration --- sprouted directly from the detritus of Vietnam. The current Iraqi incursion more closely resembles the majority of those other “interferences” of Uncle Sam listed above. Most of them actually worked out pretty well, particularly the putting down of the Philippine insurrection, which was my topic in Part One. To the extent we see any parallels here, perhaps we should score this one in the “comfort” column. Last week’s successful assassination of the leading Iraqi insurgent lends a little support to this conclusion, I think.
Whether the recurrence of oil crises is cause for comfort or concern depends, I suppose, upon whom we believe. For instance, oil expert Daniel Yergin, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the oil industry The Prize, seems to believe a lot of oil remains to be pumped out of the earth. Other experts seem less certain. Back in John D. Rockefeller’s day, widespread fears that the petroleum supply in Western Pennsylvania was finite and failing, though absolutely accurate, were also absolutely silly… since the world supply of oil and gas quickly dwarfed the Keystone State’s puny petrol reserves. Today, even if the half-empty end of the prognostications prevails, new technologies for discovering, capturing and using the earth’s remaining oil, combined with economic incentives to develop alternative fuels, such as ethanol, are cause for at least some comfort to be blended with our current, reasonable concerns.
What of illegal immigration? Let me repeat what I’ve said in print several times before: those who argue that our ancestors got the chance to come to America, and therefore, everyone else should be afforded the same chance, are guilty of what the late-historian Barbara Tuchman (best remembered for her best-seller The Guns of August) liked to called “wooden-headedness.” With thrice the population of a century ago, the U.S. can ill afford to operate with open borders. The terrorist attacks of Nine-Eleven are only the tip of the iceberg. Continuation of our laissez faire policy toward illegal immigration could lead to a U.S. population of a billion or more by the turn of the next century. This, I believe, is cause for concern.
Last, but never least, is the question of wealth and democracy. Data I garnered for that column indicated that the current share of the nation’s wealth enjoyed by its richest few is not out of line with what the fat cats controlled in 19 th and 20 th centuries. One hundred years ago, John D. Rockefeller was the nation’s wealthiest individual. His Standard Oil trust was attacked under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and broken upon into the so-called Seven Sisters of the 20 th century oil industry. John D. emerged from the litigation a richer man. Today Bill Gates stands in Rockefeller’s shoes. His company, too, came under anti-trust attack by the Department of Justice. He, too, has survived and continued to prosper, together with his creature, Microsoft.
All the same, the recent verdicts in the Enron criminal trials indicate that the system still works… at least with regard to the worst sorts of corporate abuses. CEO compensation continues to sore, due in part --- at least according to former-Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s book The Work of Nations--- to the concurrent decline of organized labor to its anemic numbers of the early 1900s. Perhaps, as the splintering away of the Service Employees International Union from the AFL-CIO recently might suggest, the time has come for a more-militant labor movement once again to storm the boardroom barricades to reset the balance between executive compensation and rank-and-file wages. But, whether or not that happens, history suggests that the Republican can cope with errant fat cats under the continuing rule of law.
Bottom line: I guess I feel more comfort than concern, when I compare our past with our present and try to prognosticate about our future as a nation.
However, I must close on a final note of concern. During the 1988 vice-presidential debate, a youthful Dan Quayle likened himself to JFK. His opponent, Senator Lloyd Benston, retorted, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.” In 2006, as in 1906, we have a Republican in the White House. However, paraphrasing Senator Benston, I must say, “Mr. Bush, you are no Teddy Roosevelt.” And that, folks, is cause for concern.
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Huge Throng of Illegal Immigrants in NJ Wait Word on New Laws
Millennium Radio ^ | Wednesday, March 29, 2006 | By: David Matthau
Posted on March 29, 2006 8:16:45 AM EST by Calpernia
Debate is heating up in Washington over proposed immigration reform.
Some federal lawmakers favor rounding up all illegal aliens and deporting them as felons, but there is growing support for legislation that would legalize the nations 11 million illegal immigrants - including an estimated 250 to 4 hundred thousand right here in Jersey- and ultimately allow them to become U.S. citizens.
Rider University Ethnic Studies expert Dr. James Castagnera says legalizing illegal immigrants in Jersey might provide a big financial shot in the arm, because "the likelihood that they would work on the books, rather than off the books- and therefore pay into the payroll taxes, the unemployment tax, the disability tax- I think increases dramatically."
He adds that most illegal immigrants in the Garden State are working - in low level, dirty, back breaking jobs no one else wants - "so I don't see that any jobs that might be held by citizen or legal immigrants in New Jersey are going to be lost."
Dr. Castagnera says Jersey continues to attract a huge number of illegal immigrants because we're an ethnic melting pot, and "we're a coastal state, we're an urban state, we're a state with a fairly high number of employment opportunities."
More: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1605287/posts
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March 11, 2008
"Common Sense" by Jim Castagnera
Proposition One: The problem isn't legal v. illegal. The problem is adding three million (one percent) to the population every year.
Proposition Two: More people mean more sprawl. Sprawl means loss of irreplaceable farm land.
The consequences?
"At the present growth rate of 1.1% per year, the U.S. population will double to more than half a billion people within the next 60 years. It is estimated that approximately one acre of land is lost due to urbanization and highway construction alone for every person added to the U.S. population.
This means that only 0.6 acres of farmland would be available to grow food for each American in 2050, as opposed to the 1.8 acres per capita available today. At least 1.2 acres per person is required in order to maintain current American dietary standards. Food prices are projected to increase 3 to 5-fold within this period.
If present population growth, domestic food consumption and topsoil loss trends continue, the U.S. will most likely cease to be a food exporter by approximately 2025 because food grown in the U.S. will be needed for domestic purposes.
Since food exports earn $40 billion for the U.S. annually, the loss of this income source would result in an even greater increase in America's trade deficit.
Considering that America is the world's largest food exporter, the future survival of millions of people around the world may also come into question if food exports from the U.S. were to cease."From Cornell University.
Proposition Three: This loss comes at just the time when new technologies require increased acreage. Ethenol production from corn is a prime example.
Proposition Four: In contrast to all new technologies of the past, the Internet is causing a net loss of jobs. Hi Tech is not the future of the American worker. The simple truth is that it takes fewer workers to run an Internet site, such as Amazon, than to deliver the same product or service face-to-face.
Proposition Five:Therefore, a policy worth considering from a common sense perspective might be:
1. Stop all immigration.
2. Preserve open land, especially farm land.
3. Create more jobs in the agriculture and energy sectors.
4. Push new technologies that increase (a) America's ability to export food and (b) America's energy independence.
Just a thought...
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