Tag Archives: immigration

Truths From John Kyl

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You know, I’ve sort of gotten used to U.S. politicians, primarily the Republicans but especially the Tea Party folks, spouting out random, made-up, pulled-out-of-their-ass-with-no-regard-for-reality statements to support their arguments.

Need to discredit President Barack Obama’s citizenship and U.S. birth status? No problem. Do what Sarah Palin and Donald Trump have done and say that he’s paid more than $2 million in legal fees to fight calls to see his birth certificate (which he long ago produced by the way) so he must have something to hide. No reason to point out that he’s actually paid more than $2 million to a legal firm for all of his legal work related to his presidential campaign and just being president, of which spurious claims that he’s not a citizen are one small part of the pile (John McCain had to pay well over a million dollars in legal fees just to tidy up post-campaiging matters, and his campaign wasn’t as big as Obama’s).

Want to make sure you can squeeze out every last penny for military spending and making sure that the ultra rich and big corporations continue to get ever richer while the middle class is shredded to bits? Just say things like, “Planned Parenthood shouldn’t get any federal funding because more than 90% of what they do is abortions.”

Wait? What? No, really? You said that, Arizona Senator John Kyl?

No matter that only 3% of what they do is abortions and the rest are health issues like breast exams, pap smears, and STD testing, plus contraceptive-related services. What’s an 87-percentage-point difference among rabid, lying idealogues who will stop at nothing to get what they want?

So, yeah, while I thought I had seen it all, the GOP manages to decline even farther.

But you know, since we’re going that route anyway, how about I help John Kyl with his next set of talking points:

  • The government shouldn’t give any money at all to public radio because 90% of their funds are spent arming extremist Muslims in terrorist attacks on the United States
  • All funding of the arts by the federal government should cease because 90% of that art involves two men making out with each other while walking all over an American flag and pissing on a crucifix
  • Anyone with tan-colored skin (unless from a tanning booth or sunbathing) should be shipped across the border to Mexico without bothering to check their citizenship status because 90% of all Latinos in the country are guilty of illegal immigration (and it’s all Mexico’s fault)
  • All black males should be placed in prison once they reach the age of 16 because 90% of them will rape a white woman after kidnapping some white babies and selling crack to white schoolchildren right before cleaning the weapons they used to kill a bunch of upstanding white guys.

No need to thank me, Senator Kyl. Just helping you with more material you can use to advance your cause and then say afterward, “That wasn’t intended to be a factual statement.”

Oh, and senator, it takes a lot fewer words to say: “I was shamlessly lying.”

Immigration Enforcement Insanity

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Back in April, Big Man wrote a post here at his Raving Black Lunatic blog called “This Sounds Familiar,” and he compared the new immigration laws in Arizona to the issue of Freedom Papers that Blacks had to carry around in those cases when their masters had freed them from slavery.

The post was one of those times that I broke my usual rule of engaging with Thordaddy, who is a big supporter of the Arizona immigration laws (which allows police pretty much any time they have a “legitimate” reason to interact with a person to demand that the person prove her or she is in the state [and country] legally). I pointed out to him repeatedly how the law was ripe with potential for abuse because it inevitably would lead to some Mexican-heritage (or other Latino) U.S. citizen being targeted, perhaps jailed, perhaps abused, and possibly even deported.

Over and over, Thordaddy played dumb, as if I was talking nonsense. I know he really wouldn’t care if a Mexican-American citizen got arrested, beat up or even deported, because Thordaddy is clearly one of the worst kinds of racists—the kind who won’t publicly say that they like it when non-whites get the shaft, and who try to be all intellectual about how discrimination and racism are OK and natural.

But I digress.

Because, in case you haven’t heard, a case in Chicago pretty much proves my point about what is so wrong with the Arizona situation.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read about it here, but I’ll summarize quickly:

  • Eduardo Caraballo, a Puerto Rican-born man, was detained for over three days in Chicago on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant. (By the way, being Puerto Rican means you’re an American citizen)
  • Despite presenting identifying documents and even his birth certificate, Caraballo was held by federal immigration authorities over the weekend and threatened with deportation
  • He was only released when his congressman, Luis Gutierrez, intervened on his behalf
  • Authorities assumed he was Mexican, and planned to send him to Mexico

So, a guy who’s live on the mainland of the United States since he was a baby, and who was a citizen anyway, was going to be shipped “back to Mexico,” even though he was a U.S. citizen and wasn’t even Mexican.

Suddenly, the example I gave to Thordaddy in our argument online, wherein I imagined a Mexican-American U.S. citizen in Arizona taking a stroll gets arrested and perhaps sent over the border against his will, isn’t even wild speculation. I imagined what might happen to a guy who might have just gone out for a walk and left his wallet and ID at home. Here we have a guy in Chicago, where the immigration laws aren’t even as draconian as in Arizona, who almost has it happen to him and he HAD identification to show he was a citizen.

I think Rep. Gutierrez said it best when he noted: “In Arizona, they want everybody to be able to prove they’re legally in the country. They want everybody to prove that they’re an American citizen. Here we had an American citizen, that the federal government… could not determine, for more than three days, his status as an American citizen. It’s very, very, very dangerous ground to tread.”