Thousands of immigrant rights supporters filled a major Phoenix thoroughfare Friday morning as they marched toward the office of U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl in a rally call for a more humane reform of immigration laws.
"They're here for the American Dream," said Malissa Greer, 29, who joined the crowd estimate by police to be at least 10,000 strong. "God created all of us. He's not a God of the United States, he's a God of the world."
On Thursday, more than 10,000 people filled the streets of Milwaukee in what was billed as "A Day Without Latinos" to protest efforts in Congress to target undocumented workers.
Hundreds of Los Angeles students walked out of their schools Friday morning to call attention to immigration issues.
In Georgia, activists said tens of thousands of workers didn't show up at their jobs Friday after calls for a work stoppage to protest a bill passed by the Georgia House on Thursday.
I wonder who is organizing these rallies. Is the Hildabeast's enablers behind these media stunts?
I hope they scream, burn American flags and wave Mexican and La Raza flags. The uglier the better.
I wonder who is organizing these rallies. Is the Hildabeast's enablers behind these media stunts?Actually it sounds more like some republicans, like Grover Norquist, Bush's point man on immigration, who has always been great at "stunts" when it comes to illegal immigration. Read on.
Part III of Series) Illegal-immigration bill weakened by unlikely alliance (HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF!)
By Marcus Stern
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
04-Nov-1997 WASHINGTON - After years of bitter losses, Sen. Alan K. Simpson thought the political tides finally favored his quest to create a way to keep illegal immigrants from getting jobs.
The issue had emerged as a hot-button during the 1996 campaign. This time, he would surely defeat the powerful and savvy pro-immigration lobby.
"As I look out on this sea of faces, there are some who have been cutting my bicycle tire for 17 years," the now-retired Wyoming Republican said last year as the Judiciary Committee prepared to debate his proposals. "They're sitting back there, hollow-eyed, twitching like dogs eating peach seeds and wondering if they can do it again. ... Well, I think that game is over."
Simpson was wrong.
Once again, he had sorely underestimated the tenacity and cleverness of special-interest groups determined to preserve the flow of undocumented workers into the United States.
Yes, Congress eventually passed a new immigration law. But it was so weak it would do little to hasten the creation of a system to help employers quickly and reliably verify that the people working for them are in fact eligible to hold jobs in the United States. Such a system is a key to curbing illegal immigration, according to many experts.
The "twitching dogs" who dragged down Simpson's initiative last year are Capitol heavyweights whose coalition on immigration falls into the unlikely bedfellows category. Among them: the National Federation of Independent Business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Rifle Association, the Catholic church, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Bar Association and even some labor unions.
As these special interests swarmed all over Capitol Hill, however, no lobbyist represented millions of legal immigrants and other poor people, who, because of welfare reform, soon might need the low-skill jobs now being held by the rising number of undocumented workers.
"There's no National Association of Working Poor," said Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary during President Clinton's first term. "There's no special-interest lobbying group working on behalf of very poor people trying desperately to find and keep jobs.
"If a politician has to decide between the interests of small businesses seeking inexpensive help and the interests of poor Americans either seeking a job or afraid of losing a job or declining earnings, the chances are very good that the small business has far more clout."
Special-interest clout
The clout displayed last year when the immigration lobby defeated Simpson's plan is a textbook demonstration of how special interests have long dominated immigration policy in Washington.
Simpson wasn't asking for anything remotely like a national ID card or national database of workers. He merely wanted the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 to authorize pilot projects to test methods for verifying employment eligibility.
One pilot would have required participating employers to check their new employees' Social Security numbers. Because it would apply to all of their new workers, discrimination against "foreign-looking" job applicants would have been minimized.
But the anti-verification coalition painted the proposal as a sinister plot. It portrayed it as a retina-scan ID card, police-state power, the second coming of the Holocaust and even the fulfillment of a dark prophecy in the Bible's Book of Revelation that people would be stamped with the "mark of the beast."
At one meeting of the Judiciary Committee, an irritated and clearly frustrated Simpson indignantly waved a make-believe tattoo that looked like a grocery store bar code. He called it a ploy to kill his verification proposal. He was right.
Grover Norquist, a social conservative and anti-tax Republican lobbyist, reveled unapologetically in the tactics he used to undermine the verification initiative and to mock Simpson personally.
The peel-off bar-code tattoos were supposed to remind people of the way Nazis tattooed Jews during World War II. "It was great," recalled Norquist, who is close to House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "We had our guys walking around with tattoos on their arms. It drove Simpson nuts because the implication was he's a Nazi."
The truth, however, is that both the House and the Senate bills specifically barred the implementation of any kind of national ID card. Politicians view such a card as a political kiss of death; nobody expects Congress to seriously consider one.
Toward the end of the debate, Simpson decried the pranks and slurs.
"We have dealt with tattoos and Adolf Hitler," he said. "It is the most offensive thing that I have ever heard. It's disgusting and I'm sick of it."
'Mark of the beast' Although voters tend to see Republicans as tougher than Democrats on illegal immigration, the weakening of the verification provisions was largely the handiwork of conservative Republicans and their behind-the-scenes strategists like Norquist.
Their success underscores how tough it is for Congress to do the one thing experts have said for decades is central to curbing illegal immigration: Establish a reliable, non-discriminatory employment verification system.
Norquist has strong ties to the business community. Mainstream firms like Microsoft paid him to lobby against other provisions of the bill, such as tighter restrictions on the immigration of computer programmers.
But his forte is mobilizing support among social or moral conservatives, including gun owners, the religious right, home-schooling adherents and others he described as "anti-welfare and anti-police state."
"A government powerful enough to find an illegal immigrant is also powerful enough to find your bank accounts," he said.
Conveniently, he ignores the fact that the government long has been able to find bank accounts with ease while it still can't reliably identify undocumented workers.
"Nobody really minds people sneaking across the border and working at 7-Eleven," he added.
At one point during the debate, congressional offices received calls from fundamentalist ministers around the country asking about rumors that the verification provision would fulfill a prophecy in the Book of Revelation. Was it true, they asked congressional staffers, that people would be stamped with the "mark of the beast" under the new law?
"Six-six-six," Norquist explained matter-of-factly during an interview. "That's always been one of the arguments against the ID card. There's something in Revelations about numbering people. The 'beast' could be a big computer."
The National Rifle Association was told the bill would lead to a federal computer registry that the government could use to hunt down its members and seize their guns. "Gun owners quite correctly understand that it would take Bill Clinton all of two weeks to add the question, 'Got any guns? Could we have a list of them? Where do you keep them?' " said Norquist.
Verification opponents also circulated mock national identification cards bearing Simpson's likeness. On the back of the cards was a retina scan diagram suggesting that the legislation called for everyone to carry such a card.
"That was a good one," Norquist chuckled.
Anti-verification coalition Conservatives didn't fight verification alone last year. They were part of a coalition of strange bedfellows involved in civil rights, ethnic and religious advocacy, anti-government politics and free-market ideology. They were also bolstered by powerful business groups.
The coalition was a juggernaut that fought virtually any verification initiative. Because Republicans control Congress, conservative lobbyists were especially influential. The fact that some limited, voluntary verification projects stayed in the bill at all outraged some conservatives.
http://www.cis.org/articles/Katz/katz1998.html
