Immigrants & Civil Rights

On September 23, 2012 George Stephanopoulos asked Republican Ann Coulter about a page in her new book ‘Mugged’ regarding the civil rights movement. She said we got the beneficiary group right – we owe the Blacks – we don’t owe the homeless, we don’t owe feminists, we don’t owe women desirous of having abortions – we don’t owe Gays who want to get married to one another. George then asked if civil rights were for immigrants and she said - no civil rights are pretty much for Blacks. She said the point on immigration is you can have open borders or you can have a welfare state – you can’t have both – when you have a big government giving out benefits for all sorts of things than you have to care very much about who the immigrants are. She went on to say – both legal and illegal immigrants are way more likely to be on welfare than native born Americans. Ann needs to do her homework. The US government is finding corporations dependent on migrant labor, the same situation it was in back in 1929 (Hoover), 1943 (WW II-FDR), 1986 (Reagan granted amnesty to 3 million Mexican-American workers) and 1990 (GHW Bush). Clinton enacted the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and immigration bills were passed annually. However, during George W. Bush’s tenure there was a lot of talk of a comprehensive immigration bill but in 2006 there were immigration reform protests and he failed to get a bill passed. Obama used an Executive Order in 2011 to get something done. However, Congress has not passed an immigration reform bill since 2001 and it needs to end its 11 year drought. 

Several Republican states enacted tough voter registration laws and the Tea Party has vowed to go after the courts that overturned them and on September 20 it was said that Farmers Branch, Texas banned illegal immigrants from renting homes. On September 23 Robert Reich, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley said – The baby boomers are aging, we have an aging population, the only way we can improve the ratio of people who are working to people who are retired is by taking in young immigrants from the rest of the world. And anybody who doesn’t recognize that and understand this is on the wrong side of the fence.