IN A WORLD FAR AWAY and to the East, robot ships hover and fly over clusters of homes targeting the residents for a violent death. They lock in their coordinates and fire rockets down on Foreign Militants as well as innocents. An exodus of one million people flees from these alien robot killers and the attacking armies of Pakistan.
THE WAR ON DRUGS HAS RETURNED even though under increased militarization, drug production actually goes up, as does the body count, while the seizure of drugs decreases. All the facts in hand show, inarguably, that the Drug War model is a failed method of dealing with immigration—even though President Obama seems intent to resurrect it.
In the modern world, borders do not separate families, nor commerce, nor soldiers, nor bank accounts and their owners. And NAFTA has allowed Mexico’s corn crop to be so devalued that Mexico—the land where the plant was born roughly 5,000 years ago—now imports corn, forcing streams of campesinos to migrate north…where we lock them up.
PRESIDENT OBAMA declares at a town hall meeting that it is in all our interests that the heads of Lou Dobbs’, Tom Tancredo, Bill O’Reilly explode in a salsa-fantastic burst of incoherence. Which will happen as soon as they watch this video.
THERE ARE NO VOICES, YET, advising us on why we should be content in 2009 to watch complex issues of society be reduced to issues of force and more and more of our society handed over to military control. While Congress signals change (perhaps) in some areas of our approach to immigration, in other areas we seem poised to repeat old mistakes.
THOUGH WORKING TO CLOSE Guantánamo, peppering his speech with talk of law and order, and restoring US image to the world abroad, Obama still risks muddying up his accomplishments with a blatant hypocrisy: we cannot lead the way on liberty or justice when investing in detention systems from Arizona to Iraq.
THE TELESCREENS WORK ONLY IN ONE DIRECTION. The conversations are filtered, edited, neutered for your own protection. Even when we discuss such pivotal and worldshaking events as this economic malfunction we are rarely talking without misdirection. So much dialogue spat out in the service of maintaining so much division. It’s time to look to the building blocks of these quaking towers and reconfigure the entire equation.
WE CAN IGNORE MEXICO’S STRUGGLE for a tiny bit longer, maybe. But the truth is, all these injustices we rail against are connected. No border can separate them. Once we join hands in fighting the crooked elites who trick and rule and exploit us, they have no hope of winning.
PSYOPS is the phrase of the decade. From Fake Iraq news to fake US news and now in the form of secretly produced corridos meant to slip into Mexican society and deter border crossings. La Migra fancy themselves clever with a new jazzy form of deception.
LAW OUGHT TO MATCH IDEAL. If Law means anything at all, it is because it is a symbol of Truth. On this week’s Immigration Wire, we examine approaches to immigration that do nothing to synchronize real-life America with the America in songs and storybooks.
TAKE A LITTLE TRIP, take a little trip, take a little trip with meeee! AND with Tony and Carlos. Into la cocina, down México way, and to hear the story of Carlos and his familia, how he crossed the border, and an “American Success Story” if I ever heard one.
FROM THE ASHES OF THE LA RIOTS arose a lush, 14-acre community garden. The largest of its kind in the United States. Now, bulldozers threaten its future. If everyone told YOU to just give up…would you?
NO MATTER WHAT your position on immigration law happens to be; no matter how many generations your family has been rooted in this soil, these kinds of abuses are unacceptable. Treating our fellow humans in these ways simply is not, as they say, American.
ALL OVER THE NATION, communities are clamoring to be heard. In this worsening economic landscape, migrant communities are being terrorized by violent raids, families are destabilized, wage earners are jailed or detained, and xenophobic pundits continue to fuel a rising wave of hate crimes against Latinos. The stakes could not be any higher.
HERE IS A SHORT VIDEO I put together for The Media Consortium, highlighting issues like the DREAM Act, the new TV show Homeland Security USA, and Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s latest swipe at any visible legal protections for today’s undocumented population.
House of Nezua
the XOLAGRAFIK theater!
