Amnesty essential for Latino immigrants

Intoleration, discrimination and hatred of foreigners is an old, old American tradition.
It began with the Puritans who came to America for religious freedom but refused to grant it to others. Wartime violations of free speech shattered smug feelings about American liberty. The First Amendment did not protect political dissenters.
Xenophobia plagued Nevada in the 19th century. The Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, then considered the best newspaper in the West, railed against Chinese immigrants.: “The Chinaman…is the filthiest human being in existence…He dissipates wildly in that fiery concoction known as rice brandy and is a slave to the opium pipe.”
And in 1908 Nevada’s Tonopah Sun editorialized: “The importance of keeping the Pacific Coast as a white man’s country, protecting it from Chinese immigration, is one of the greatest of any services performed by the U.S. government.”
The Know Nothing Party, blighting mid-19th century politics, sought to curb Irish immigration. Job ads in Boston and New York routinely ended: “No Irish need apply.” Quotas kept Jewish enrollment in law schools artifically low. Much of the nation was outraged when Booker T. Washington, black president of Tuskegee, dined with President Roosevelt.
And so it went throughout U.S. history. Unfortunately, discrimination still litters the American landscape today. The target: Latinos.
Some troglodytes in Congress want to make illegal immigrants felons. Some would make employers who hire illegals subject to fine and jail if they didn’t play Dogberry. Others want to stretch a 700- to 2,000-mile fence along the border between America and Mexico. And some vigilantes, badly named Minutemen, are patrolling the border to keep out illegals.
The guest worker plan of President Bush? It’s just another bracero program: come in, work five years and then go back where you came from. It’s a formula for continued exploitation and denial of citizenship for Latinos. It’s a formula to delight predatory corporations and swollen agribusiness, a formula for indentured servitude.
Immigration has spawned a new civil rights movement. People are taking to the streets for that movement, a movement spearheaded by an unusual coalition of labor, churches, blacks and Spanish-language radio and TV.
Columnist Robert Scheer rightly notes: “Some 2 million immigrant workers now earn less than the minimum wage and millions more work without occupational safety, workers’ compensation, overtime pay and other protections that legal status offers.”
And does anyone need a reminder that the minimum wage is a pitful $5.15 an hour?
Another syndicated columnist, Cynthia Tucker, points out that Lou Dobbs of CNN has turned his TV show into “a forum for nativists bashing illegal immigration.”
Bush says immigrants take jobs that Americans will not. That too is untrue. If Holy Capitalists paid a decent wage, many Americans would take many of those jobs.
Steven Camarota, head of the Center for Immigration Studies, points out: “The idea that there are jobs Americans won’t do is economic gibberish. All the big occupations that immigrants are in--construction, janitorial, even agriculture--are overwhelmingly done by native-born Americans.”
Employers now can exploit immigrant workers with low pay, no health benefits, no unions and constant threats to turn--what they call recalcitrant workers--over to the feds. Adding to the frustration of illegal immigrants is that they can be fired for union organizing or taking part in protest marches.
Holy Capitalism always wins in the perpetual struggle between employers and workers, between the Haves and Have nots.
Immigrants a problem? No. A backward, purblind nation is the problem. The solution is simple: grant immediate anmesty to the 12 million illegal Latinos in America and set them on the path to quick citizenship. (Certainly not the horrible 11-year plan in some proposals.)
But that simple solution will be muddied by pandering pols. Congress rarely does what is good for America. No one has ever accused it of being humane.
Undocumented immigrants should be given immediate residence visas. Discrimination based on migrant status should be outlawed. The hellish fear that undocumented immigrants live with is intolerable in a country that so often responds with great humanitarianism to places hit by Katrinas, earthquakes and tsunamis.
Common decency and humaneness demand that immigrants get health care, education for their kids and access to welfare programs. Immigrants pay taxes, have Social Security deductions and help fuel the economy.
This country has been built on immigration. Immigrants have always chased that dream of a better life. May immigration continue forever.