It looks like the Bush administration is cracking down on immigrants, even as GOP Presidential candidate John McCain is saying that we have to accept the “practical necessity to institute a temporary worker program and deal humanely with the millions of immigrants who have been in this country illegally,” according to the L.A. Times.
I find it hard to believe that the GOP faithful will allow McCain to do anything even remotely friendly to immigrants. If he wins the White House I suspect the crackdown on immigrants will continue. We needed them during the housing construction boom, now that the real estate market has crashed, the Republicans want everyone to go home.
Case in point, “Monday’s raid on the Agriprocessors plant (in Iowa), in which 389 immigrants were arrested and many held at a cattle exhibit hall, was the Bush administration’s largest crackdown on illegal workers at a single site. It has upended this tree-lined community, which calls itself “Hometown to the World,” according to the Washington Post.
The Bush administration doesn’t believe water boarding is torture. And they think it is OK to put immigrants in a cattle exhibit hall. Will the McCain administration really be that much of a departure from the Republicans currently in the White House? I doubt it.
The L.A. Times also reported today that “The federal government is accepting bids for up to three new family detention centers that would house as many as 600 men, women and children fighting deportation cases.”
How many more people will suffer before Bush finally leaves the White House?
I don’t buy McCain’s moderate spin. His party won’t allow anything remotely moderate to happen under his watch. The only way I could possibly vote for him would be if Hillary Clinton was the Democratic presidential nominee, and that seems unlikely now. Nor would I vote for the Dem ticket if she was the V.P. nominee. Hopefully Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee, in which case he will get my vote.
There is just too much at stake to allow McCain to win.
The currency is question is called the ‘Amero.’ Learn it, love it, live it. It’s coming.
SMS
I happen to think that the importation of this low wage workforce by powerful corporate forces, a workforce that is paid substandard wages and is often without healthcare coverage, is an outrage in the FIRST place. Really, it’s a somewhat more dignified version of slave labor. This should be viewed as beneath the values that this country stands for.
I understand that these jobs benefit the people taking them. But there are larger moral questions at stake than simply what benefits those workers.
i guess art dose not want our laws enforced .yes they raided the plant for ILLEGAL WORKERS . they are not suppose to be here . they are not suppose to work here . so they should also fine the plant that hired them . round them up and send them back home . they are driving the work wages down .
Before we devolve into xenophobic generalities lets look objectively at what the situation is. First we have a national security imperative to secure all points of entry into these United States. We should be six years into operating this at every entry point but we’ve only done the airlines so far. Second, we have developed an economy that relies on imigrant labor in sometimes slavelike conditions which can no longer be ignored. Third, we have within our borders an unprecedented number of undocumented citizens of other nations that need to be treated humanely while they are naturalized or deported. Fourth our current systems cannot handle this problem. Our economy needs some kind of break to be competitive in the world economy and if we remove cheap labor we will have to subsidize them another way. All of this will require higher taxes to pay for. Lastly, there is not the political will to anything more to solve this than to pull photo-op stunts like that in the news recently.