[statecom-discuss] State fails immigrants

[Lloyd Smith]

  Hi Folks,I didn't vote for my brother,Patrick!All of this reminds of a 
  quote I just heard last night(Sunday).To paraphrase Goebels(if that's
  how you spell his name-of Nazi fame)- it is very important to create the 
  impression of diversity of political control as a way of successfully
  maintaining absolute repression!



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kim Lampereur [mailto:kimlampereur at gmail.com]
> Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2007 11:38 PM
> To: statecom-discuss at green-rainbow.org
> Subject: [statecom-discuss] State fails immigrants
> 
> "According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Patrick and
> Department of Social Services Commissioner Harry Spence were alerted
> in advance to plans to storm the factory"
> 
> ____________________________________________________________
> 
> http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/03/11/state_fails_immigrants?p1=email_to_a_friend
> 
> ____________________________________________________________
> 
> 
> EILEEN MCNAMARA
> 
> State fails immigrants
> 
> March 11, 2007
> 
> It is no small irony that the Spanish-speaking grandmothers and
> nursing mothers rounded up as national security threats in an
> immigration raid on a New Bedford leather factory were stitching
> safety vests and backpacks for the US military.
> 
> The government's  multimillion-dollar contract with the owners of the
> factory where hundreds of low-wage earners were led away in shackles
> after an immigration sweep last week underscores the absurd
> contradictions inherent in our  immigration policy. One federal
> bureaucracy is trying to deport the same undocumented workers whose
> cheap labor another federal bureaucracy is content to exploit.
> 
> The agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who carried out the
> raid  work for an administration in Washington that has acknowledged
> that these sweeps are meaningless without comprehensive reform of
> national immigration policy. "The system we have in place has caused
> people to rely upon smugglers and forgers in order to do the work
> Americans aren't doing," President Bush said last December after a
> series of high-profile immigration sweeps across the nation. "It is a
> system that frankly leads to inhumane treatment of people."
> 
> Why, then, does the White House not call for an immediate cessation of
> these raids in favor of a long-promised and long-overdue overhaul of a
> broken system?
> 
> The bungled raid on the Michael Bianco factory served to provoke what
> Governor Deval Patrick rightly called "a humanitarian crisis" by
> shipping hundreds of workers, most of them women, to federal detention
> facilities in Texas, thousands of miles away from their families. Now,
> at considerable taxpayer expense, federal officials are trying to
> remedy their precipitous separation of mothers from their children.
> But, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Patrick and
> Department of Social Services Commissioner Harry Spence were alerted
> in advance to plans to storm the factory. What responsibility then
> does the state bear for the mess that ensued? How did five of the
> eight minors picked up in the sweep wind up in a Miami detention
> facility without DSS knowledge?
> 
> Did state officials ask what was to happen to those detained? Did they
> insist that immigration officials provide legal counsel to detainees
> before they bundled them onto planes bound for Texas? Did they ask
> what imminent threat required that these women be removed from
> Massachusetts for deportation hearings that could be held here just as
> easily?
> 
> Decrying the consequences of inept federal action is a poor substitute
> for taking the precautions necessary to protect the basic human rights
> of Massachusetts residents, legal or undocumented.
> 
> Carolyn Newberger is a child psychologist in Brookline who has earned
> a national reputation for her work with neglected and abused children.
> The abrupt separation of mothers and children precipitated by this
> raid "is child neglect by any definition I know," she said in an
> e-mail.   "If, as the US Department of Homeland Security claims, the
> Massachusetts Department of Social Services 'worked closely' with them
> prior to the raid on the Bianco clothing factory in New Bedford, then
> our state agency charged with the protection of children has itself
> actively collaborated in children's abandonment, starvation, and
> traumatic psychological injury. The damage to the children left behind
> is inevitable and incalculable, and the leadership of DSS must be held
> to account for their roles in this travesty."
> 
> Soon after taking office, Patrick wisely rescinded Mitt Romney's plan
> to deputize State Police as immigration agents. Romney's proposal was
> political pandering of the most craven kind, designed to fuel the
> anti-immigrant hysteria that is the red meat of the far right. Real
> leadership requires more, however. By stepping aside for the storm
> trooper tactics of the ICE agents, the Patrick administration is
> complicit in the results.
> 
> Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at
> mcnamara at globe.com .
> 
> (c)Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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