Category — Immigration

“What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?” Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Institute Address, February 27, 1860.

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Abraham Lincoln’s First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861.

I can quote from Lincoln too, Mr. Roskam, but that doesn’t make me look like him any more than it does you.

On December 28th, Peter Roskam published a glowing self-assessment of his first year in Congress, complete with liberal quotations from Abraham Lincoln to try and make himself appear a statesman.

By Roskam’s account he spent the year battling against partisanship but in the end triumphed by squeaking out a temporary fix to the Alternative Minimum Tax and an Energy Bill. Nothing could be further from the truth.

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Yesterday, Peter Roskam’s web site published a “news item” commenting on the State of Illinois’ agreement to allow employers to use E-Verify to validate employee work authorization, while a federal lawsuit against the State is resolved.

According to Roskam the E-Verify system “provides real-time, accurate verification based on identity information in federal databases, giving employers assurance that the people they hire are legally able to work in the U.S.”.

But in reality, the database has been found to be inaccurate and fails to meet the standards set by Congress.

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In their efforts to distract voters from from their record of corruption and incompetence, the Republican Party has adopted the strategy of waging war against undocumented immigrants. Voters should beware. The destruction that the Bush administration’s politically-guided management has left in Iraq and New Orleans alone should be ample proof that politics, or at least Republican politics, makes bad policy. Real people’s lives, the lives of our brothers and sisters, our friends and neighbors, will be affected by the decisions made regarding immigration policy. We should reject any attempt to make changes in policy a tool for political gain, whether by Republicans or Democrats.

The New York Times ran a story on November 17th that highlights the effect that the Bush administration’s stepped-up enforcement is having on the children of undocumented parents, many of whom are U.S. citizens and are being forced to choose between remaining in their own country or being with their parents when the parents are deported. An estimated 3 million children with undocumented parents are U.S. citizens. More and more of them will be affected by parental deportation as the Republican war on immigrants heats up prior to the 2008 election.

It is my hope that citizens of the 6th Congressional district will reject Peter Roskam’s anti-family immigration policies and reject any Democrat who embraces them.

Kudos to John Laesch, who is running for Denny Hastert’s seat in IL-14 and is standing up to Jim Oberweis on his anti-immigrant campaign. It’s a shame about Jim Oberweis. I’ve always wanted to try his ice cream but he keeps running for stuff on the same hateful platform and I can’t bring myself to do it. Hope IL-06 Dems will follow John’s lead.

Peter Roskam has evidently decided that there are votes to be gained by being a bully. He and his Republican colleagues are scared. 7 years of Republican administration have left the country in miserable shape. We are fighting a horribly misguided war in Iraq that is leaving our military in a dangerously weakened state. Our reputation in the world is in tatters. The lawless administration has embraced torture and endless detention, even of U.S. citizens with out recourse to courts. The regulatory agencies that protect the quality of our environment and the safety of our food, drugs and workplaces over to industry lobbyists. And we are beginning a descent into recession as a result of unsound Republican economic and regulatory policies.

And so what does any good Republican like Peter do when faced with the disastrous consequences of his own policies? Why find someone weak and voiceless to blame it all on and run for office based upon their toughness against this so-called enemy. That is what Peter Roskam and his allies have done in their endorsement of anti-gay bigotry and that is exactly what they are trying to do now with their get-tough policies regarding undocumented immigrants. There is no immigration crisis. There is only a crisis in the Republican party relative to their dismal prospects in the 2008 elections.

Now Peter Roskam has launched another salvo against undocumented workers in the form of H.R. 4176, the Prevention of Unsafe Licensing Act. The bill, if enacted, would prevent the individual states from issuing drivers licenses to undocumented workers. It is another attempt to appease and incite the xenophobic right and the expense of a class of our hard-working, tax-paying friends and neighbors. This bill will not only take food from the mouths and clothes from the backs of these workers but will increase the financial risk to all Illinois citizens as unlicensed motorists cannot obtain insurance.

We have laws already to allow the Federal government to detain and deport undocumented workers. This bill is simply piling on for political gain and it should be rejected. Common decency and humanity demand that it be rejected.

In a new op-ed on his congressional web site dated 11/24/2007 (a week from this coming Saturday), Peter Roskam trumpets that “The time for mandatory employee verification is now.” That left me scratching my head for a minute but I have since regained my composure.

Roskam, reaching for votes from the xenophobic right while trying to scare the rest of us into supporting a bad law, goes on to conflate the issues of undocumented immigration and airport security, and, if that wasn’t enough, to blame the failures of George Bush’s incompetent Department of Homeland Security on Governor Blagojevich.

That the Bush Administration can’t get airport security (or much of anything else) right is no excuse to victimize thousands of ordinary workers, documented and undocumented alike, who just want to provide for their families.

E-Verify doesn’t work. As many as one in ten “ineligibles” will be a false-positive, potential denying a United States citizen the right to work. And even if it did work, its blanket application would be just plain mean-spirited. There are higher laws than the immigration code to which we must answer.

Peter Roskam’s website today announces his co-sponsorship of Secure America with Verification and Enforcement Act of 2007 (SAVE). I haven’t had much time to look at this legislation yet. According to the website, it will add 8,000 new border patrol agents by 2012, mandate employers use the E-verify system to verify employee eligibility, add Immigration and Customs enforcement agents, and train state and local law enforcement agents to aid in immigration enforcement.

Roskam asserts that “millions of people cross our border illegally every year to work in a shadow economy, often in dangerous conditions and for wages the American worker can’t take” and calls this a “common sense approach to our nation’s massive illegal immigration problem”.

Well I may be the only person left who believes this but I think this immigration crisis rhetoric is bullshit. This is a crisis that was dreamed up by Republicans to distract the citizenry while they were picking their pockets. And now it disgusts me to see Democrats jumping on the “tough on illegal immigration” bandwagon.

Where Peter is correct is in saying that these undocumented workers often work in dangerous conditions for unjust wages. But I think he’s wrong to suggest that they are taking jobs from American workers. They are taking jobs that Americans don’t want and are paying federal, state, and local taxes on their incomes and purchases.

If Peter is serious about helping alleviate their dangerous working conditions and unjust wages, he should be pushing his party to expand the minimum wage and increase OSHA enforcement. Intensification of verification efforts and involving state and local officials in enforcement is likely to adversely affect workers who are here legally and increase hardship in immigrant communities.

I don’t care if I’m the only one who thinks so but all this so-called immigration reform legislation is just plain mean-spirited. It is worse still to see it promoted by self-described people of faith. They would do well to revisit Deuteronomy 10 where care of the stranger is described as part of the very essence of the law:

“For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of Lords, the great God , mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You also shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

I am totally opposed to the present efforts of legislators, Democratic and Republican alike, to lay more burdens on the backs of undocumented workers.