Subject: RE: [Marxism] Kerry: no drivers licenses for illegals
Date: Sat, 3 Jul 2004 21:51:55 -0400
From: Jose G. Perez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 'Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition' <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
John Kerry's slap in the face of the Latino community by coming out against state laws that allow anyone to get a driver's license regardless of immigration status should not surprise anyone. Kerry was one of the backers of the 1996 Immigration Reform Act that imposed this discrimination against undocumented immigrants in the issuing of driver's licenses on state governments in the first place.
Until very recently, virtually no state mixed immigration matters with driver's licenses. That is because under the Constitution, immigration is an issue under the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government, and the courts have been quite clear in saying that states may not, of their own initiative, do ANYTHING in relation to immigration. That is unconstitutional meddling in the federal government's affairs.
In the 1990's as part of the Proposition 187 Republican anti-immigrant campaign, California passed restrictive legislation.
Then in 1996 came the Clinton Immigration Reform Act and the companion welfare reform, which cut off even "legal" immigrant access to many social programs. Essentially it was the spirit of the California Republican anti-immigrant initiatives rewritten as a federal law -- by the Democrats.
Among other things, the Democrats snuck into the Immigration bill measures to transform state-issued drivers licenses into a national ID card/internal passport.
The way it was instrumented was a) requiring fingerprinting and b) requiring a verified social security number to get drivers licenses.
Notice I singled out the Democrats. That's because implementation of this aspect of the law was opposed by the Gingrich faction of the Republicans, who eventually realized that they had approved a law creating an internal passport system, which they oppose. They attached riders to appropriation bills specifically prohibiting the federal government from spending any money to implement the national ID card aspect of the immigration reform. And they promised they would repeal this aspect of the law.
However, then Clinton got caught with Lewinsky and the Republicans forgot all about the issue.
We should remember that under the Clinton regime, undocumented immigration was not a major issue in Washington. The Reagan-era amnesty had just been implemented, and the problem was assumed to be mainly one of the Central American refugees and migrant agricultural workers from Mexico, a couple of million people, give or take.
So those 1996 mandates went into effect on Oct. 1, 2000. And as states brought their laws into compliance with the federal mandate, the shit hit the fan.
That's because the undocumented immigrant population wasn't just one or two million Mexican migrant workers plus some Central American refugees, but a settled population that today numbers 10 to 15 million people, and very much intimately interpenetrated with an equally huge official migration coming from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Moreover, the immigration is very heavily concentrated in just a few states in the "sunbelt."
And the results of the 2000 census, which showed the population was several *million* people larger than had been estimated by the Census Bureau, even without compensating for the inevitable undercount of those branded "illegal" by the state, made this reality very difficult to ignore.
One of the main factors pushing this migration has been the devastation of the Mexican peasantry by U.S. agribusiness. The vendepatria governments of the PRI and the PAN have allowed the unrestricted import of U.S. corn and other agricultural products without doing anything about the monstrous U.S. agribusiness subsidies, export supports and other programs. This policy has been the ruin of the small farmer in Mexico, and unleashed the huge wave of migration to the United States that began in the mid-1990's, and which even the three years of the Bush recession appear to have done nothing to blunt.
As states have imposed these drivers licenses restrictions, the resentment and outrage of the Latino community has grown. It has become an issue like "the back of the bus" was for Blacks in the 1950's, a symbol of all the privations and indignities Latinos --especially immigrants-- are made to suffer.
And it comes on top of a whole series of attacks and usurpations launched by the Clinton Administration, and which have been redoubled since September 11.
The frustration in the Latino community over this issue cannot be overstated. The lack of a drivers license is used to single out Latinos for discriminatory and humiliating treatment in all fields. Even something as simple as a 25-year-old buying a beer at some bar or convenience store can become a hassle. And common workarounds to the lack of a social security number -- use of the drivers license number instead -- have been disrupted.
What Anglos -- and even many Afro-Americans -- consider just a bureaucratic nuisance, like signing up for phone service, a cell phone, or electrical service, become nightmares for the underclass of undocumented migrants. And capitalist vultures step in to rip off such vulnerable people.
In the Atlanta area, there is a little boomlet in non-traditional phone companies. But it's not people competing on price and features with the traditional monopoly, Southern Bell/BellSouth. It's people selling the exact same service Bell South offers for 50% more, paid in advance, with only this one difference: "no credit check."
And, of course, the government is getting into the act. Some counties in Georgia have jacked up the fine for failure to have a drivers license to as much as $700, and at least one county has become a no-go area for Hispanics. Anyone who looks Hispanic WILL be stopped by the cops.
Banks are also profiteering. An Anglo bank using a DBA mechanism has rechristened some Atlanta area branches El Banco de la Comunidad ("the bank of the community" in Spanish) and it is offering mortgages to immigrants at interest rates of over 10 percent. Things are so farkled that immigrants are grateful for the offer to these usurers in brown makeup.
State legislatures are tripping over themselves to pass laws barring undocumented immigrants from state colleges and universities, and the "liberals" instead propose to charge the few who may be able to afford it out-of-state tuition rates.
The gavachos who are doing this have sown the wind, and they *WILL* reap the whirlwind.
Latinos make up 7% of the U.S. adult population, but are 21% of those under five. Georgia already has one county that is believed to have "tipped" and become majority Latino; this is going to become an increasingly common phenomenon all over the South and Southwest.
And here is the catch: many if not most of those Latinos are going to be immigrants without the right to vote. So you will have essentially Anglo minority regimes lording it over disenfranchised Latino majorities. If you want to find out how viable such political arrangements are over time, look up the name "Rhodesia" in a history book.
What is being institutionalized, and this is going on TODAY, is a system of legal, de-jure discrimination, Jim Crow and Apartheid all over again.
And the response will be as Malcolm X said in 1964: the ballot or the bullet. The ballot for EVERYONE. And once the Latino community takes up this demand, the results will be explosive.
The immigration and job, housing and other discrimination patterns are such that Latinos --especially the new immigrants-- tend to cluster.
On average, people become citizens after being in the United States two decades. I believe the Latino communities will explode long before most people become citizens.
For one thing, becoming a citizen now costs thousands of dollars. You've got to get legalized first. And then you have to pay hundreds of dollars in fees to apply, to get photographed and fingerprinted, to get photographed and fingerprinted again because the regulations require pictures take within so much time and it takes la migra longer than that to process the application. You need a lawyer because the regulations are now so complex that regular people can't navigate them without one. Two decades is the average looking back. Looking forward, it is anyone's guess.
If the Latino communities do explode, a big part of the reason will be scams like the one being pulled off right now by both the Democrats and Republicans. If you got to the state government, they will tell you there's nothing they can do, the drivers license thing is a federal mandate.
But if you go to Bush (and now Kerry's press office has issued a statement along the same lines, in effect retracting his real position), they will tell you it is a state matter. Federalism and all that.
And if you go to community meetings, as I do, you will see the most humble of the humble, as we say in Spanish, a Mexican peasant, his hat in hand as a symbol of deference, telling anyone who will listen that his 18-year-old son is a good boy and doesn't have a driver's license because they won't give it to him and can someone please help him get his son out of jail.
And one day the response at that meeting will be to free the youngster, not by petitioning or hiring lawyers, but by direct action. And then there will be hell to pay.
José
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