Pelosi Suggests Permanent U.S. Slave Class
by Guest Contributor Nezua, originally published at The Unapologetic Mexican
AS SADDENED AND CYNICAL as I have become about humankind in my life, I still nurture a belief in the human heart and the sense of Right. I still feel that in most cases of wrong being done, all it takes is thinking, feeling people getting the real facts of a situation. And the facts of this situation are shocking and revolting to a thinking mind and feeling heart.
Buried in the final paragraphs of this article*, the Democratic Speaker of the House offers the LA Times a shocking idea: That millions of immigrants now in the USA—who are currently a deeply-enmeshed part of our commerce and communities—might be relegated to a permanent status of neither citizenship or deportee. What is left after you strike those two possibilities? As Duke said, an indentured class.
The estimated 12 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally “are part of the U.S. economy. We cannot send them all home, and we cannot send them all to jail, so we have to address it,” Pelosi said.
Any solution would have to be bipartisan, she said, so it may require sacrificing some of Democrats’ past priorities, such as giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.
“Maybe there never is a path to citizenship if you came here illegally,” Pelosi said. “I would hope that there could be, but maybe there isn’t.”
—Pelosi says Congress unlikely to approve tax rebate before President Bush leaves office
DREAMactivist points out right away that many New Americans (migrants/immigrants) were in fact brought here. So what does Pelosi’s quote mean in that context? If the immigrant in question didn’t “Come here illegally,” but is a child who was brought here illegally? Does Nancy Pelosi believe that the child should then be relegated to detention? An indentured status? Permanent US Guest Worker in the Land of the Free?
Surely, Nancy Pelosi is in a position to realize that undocumented migrants are not undocumented out of choice–we CANNOT become legal no matter how much we want to. Hello? What part of legal immigration don’t you understand? Those of us brought here by our parents illegally CANNOT become legal without legislation such as the DREAM Act or Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Additionally, requiring us to go home means a 10-year ban and separation from our families–what sort of family unification plan is that?
—Nancy Pelosi Sells Out to the Immigration Reform Foes
And of those who are not brought here by parents, but who make these horrific and risky journeys to become Americans, Jeff Yang (and Karen Narasaki) has some words worth considering:
“We’re now in an era [where politicians imply] gradations of American-ness,” says Karen Narasaki, executive director of the Asian American Justice Center. “People in small towns are more American than those who live in cities. People in the middle of the country are more American than people who live on the coasts. People who live in New York, L.A., San Francisco, well, they’re not really ‘American’ at all, which is fascinating, because those are the cities that epitomize America to the entire rest of the world.”
On this gradated scale, immigrants are the least American of all, despite the fact that they of all people have made the conscious choice to embrace America, rather than being American by accident of birth.
“As [former congressman and Secretary of Transportation] Norm Mineta is fond of saying, ‘Immigrants leave the country of their birth to come to the country of their heart,’” says Narasaki. “It puzzles me why people would think that naturalized citizens are somehow ‘less American’ than people born here.”
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