The Invention of "Illegal" Humans: a Recipe for Imperialism in Haiti

"Illegal Aliens are undocumented Humans" (source: Life)

A recipe for American imperialism in Ayiti (Haiti)

1. deny our people democracy and freedom in their own nation by way of numerous occupations.

2. steal their resources.

3. kidnap their president.

4. once you have caused optimal havoc,

5. ship Ayisyens (Haitians) back to the mess you helped create.

For added flavor:

6. A Black president can select G.W.Bush and Bill Clinton to supervise the "rebuilding" effort.

Yes comrades, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.GI

Neo-Washington Consensus. Enemies of Haitian Progress

(dap @ JP for story below)


60,000 Haitians apply for temporary stay in U.S. - CTV News

The Associated Press
 
Updated: Mon. Dec. 20 2010 9:17 PM ET

MIAMI — Haitian advocates angrily called on the Obama administration on Monday to stop detaining Haitians with criminal records and halt deportations scheduled next month, saying those flights amount to a death sentence amid a cholera outbreak in the earthquake-ravaged country.

The U.S. government's abrupt decision to resume deporting Haitians also will deter others without criminal records from applying to temporarily stay and work in the U.S., cutting off a lifeline to quake survivors, they said at a rally in Miami's Little Haiti.

"Without letting us know they'll resume deportations to Haiti, at a time when Haiti is living under its gravest crisis, it's so unfair," said Marleine Bastien, executive director of Haitian Women of Miami. "It's supposed to be a progressive government. We're gravely disappointed by this."

More than 61,000 Haitians have applied for temporary protected status, which allows illegal immigrants from countries experiencing armed conflict or environmental disasters to stay and work in the U.S. for 18 months. Only those who were already living in the U.S. illegally when the earthquake struck Jan. 12 are eligible.

More than half the applications have come from Florida, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Officials have said they expected 70,000 to 100,000 Haitians to apply before the Jan. 18 deadline.

Meanwhile, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed Dec. 10 that deportations are set to resume next month for Haitians who have completed their criminal sentences, in co-ordination with Haiti's government.

Partly driving the U.S. government's decision was the fact that U.S. law prohibits immigrants from being detained indefinitely, except in extreme circumstances, said ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez. If detainees cannot be returned home, they must be released.

The U.S. anticipates deporting about 700 Haitians with criminal records in 2011, Gonzalez said. 

Read full story @ CTV

tags: haiti, illegal immigration, imperialism, immigration 

also dig:

• Maxine Waters's chilling account of the US overthrow Haiti's President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide 
• The Haitian Crisis: A Symposium at Harvard University
• Focus on Haiti, Association of Black Anthropologists
• The womyn of Ayiti (Haiti): "We want participation and training"
• "Senegal to house 160 Haitian youngsters"
• Should African Nations Help Ayiti (Haiti)?

"Shooting Cans: The Racist Assault on the 14th Amendment " by Kevin Alexander Gray

Image via Wikipedia"The Reconstruction-era amendment, finally adopted as part of the Constitution in 1868, ensured that former enslaved Africans and their children were U.S. citizens. Together with the 13th Amendment, which bans slavery, and the 15th, which prohibits the government from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude, the 14th Amendment is fundamental to the whole country's long walk toward human rights and equality under the law."

Kevin Alexander Gray

One of the many racist jokes I heard in the 70s during my time in the military starts with two white soldiers on the rifle range. One soldier asks the other how he learned to shoot so well. “I like shooting cans right off the fence," the other soldier says, "Af-ri-cans, Por-to-ri-cans and Mex-i-cans.”

The joke came to mind when I heard Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina saying, “birthright citizenship is a mistake,” followed by his GOP cohorts’ claim that immigrants have “anchor babies” as a way to tie themselves to the benefits of U.S. citizenship. Graham says he’s considering introducing a bill to rescind Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which generally guarantees U.S. citizenship to those who are born within U.S. borders.

That is not all it does. The section reads:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Also called the "due process" clause or the "equal protection" clause, this part of the 14th Amendment is the very foundation of U.S. civil rights law. The new nullifiers who talk of getting rid of it thus signal the nature of their purpose and the intrinsic unity of those they hold in contempt, like so many cans on the fence.

"Anchor babies" makes for better headlines, and it's diverting. “People come here to have babies,” says Graham. “They come here to drop a child. It's called, 'drop and leave.' To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child's automatically an American citizen. That shouldn't be the case.”

“Drop a child.” It’s as if he were talking about animals.

Graham is not up for re-election, but his child-dropping potshot is designed to appease a right wing that is angry because he's “too liberal,” he’s “no Jim DeMint,” saddled up with the Tea Party and the likes of Ollie North and Tom Tancredo. A Greenville County Republican committee even voted to bar Graham from future meetings and events, censuring him “for his cooperation and support of President Obama and the Democratic Party’s liberal agenda.”

So Graham, once a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, has taken to sounding a lot like South Carolina Republican Lt. Governor Andre Bauer, who while running for Governor in a losing bid, said about the poor:

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."

Graham's tack to the farther right concisely illustrates the recent trajectory of politics in South Carolina. Not so long ago, when Fritz Hollings was Senator, there was an unspoken deal that a state delegation of one liberal and one conservative represented. It still left the poor and black mostly behind, but the balance it struck indicated an accommodation to competing views, at least within the pinched terms of mainstream politics. Once Hollings was replaced by Jim DeMint that deal was off. But the forces DeMint represents are not content with a conservative Republican monopoly on the Senate delegation, so ordinary conservatism becomes the new "liberal" and Graham is on the run.

And what better place to run than into the warm ooze of race politics, where South Carolina has led the nation for more than 200 years? As point man for the Senate assault on the 14th Amendment, Graham is also cover for his friend and onetime “moderate” John McCain. McCain’s home state of Arizona is now ground zero in the immigration fight. He’s facing a tough re-election battle, so echoing the call for hearings on the “birth tourism” issue is the shot to fire. The farther right is happy to fall in line. Iowa Senator Charles Grassley said the amendment ought to be “reconsidered.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said, “I think we ought to take a look at it -- hold hearings, listen to the experts on it.” Jon Kyl of Arizona said that the only point of such “hearings” would be to consider the repeal of the provision: “The 14th Amendment [has been] interpreted to provide that if you are born in the United States, you are a citizen no matter what. So the question is, if both parents are here illegally, should there be a reward for their illegal behavior?”

Over in the House, Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio claimed that the nation's schools and hospitals are “being overrun” by illegal immigrants. Representative Gary Miller of California had the jump on all of them last year when he sponsored a bill that would limit birthright citizenship to children born in the U.S. with at least one parent who is a naturalized citizen, legal permanent resident or member of the U.S. military. Ninety-three House Republicans have co-sponsored that Birthright Citizenship Act of 2009. It would change the law by statute rather than by constitutional amendment, but nobody much noticed it until now.

There is a perverse benefit to all of this blatant nativism. It reminds us of our history, and ought to be a wake up to everyone among those groups lined up on the fence who may have forgotten the true nature of the system and mistakenly believed themselves to be Amer-i-cans.

Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and one of those co-sponsors of the Birthright Citizenship Act, argues that “When it [the 14th Amendment] was enacted in 1868, there were no illegal immigrants in the United States because there were no immigration laws until 1875. So drafters of the amendment could not have intended to benefit those in our country illegally.”

Smith is wrong, considering the status of enslaved Africans imported into the country after the 1807 ban against the overseas trade in human beings. Those Africans were brought to the U.S. illegally, so what would be the status of their progeny?

Therein begins the history lesson. On May 30, 1866, Senator Jacob Merritt Howard of Michigan, who drafted the citizenship part of the amendment, said, "This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States." The only exceptions were for children born to foreign diplomats and children born of alien enemies who were detained or imprisoned.

The Reconstruction-era amendment, finally adopted as part of the Constitution in 1868, ensured that former enslaved Africans and their children were U.S. citizens. Together with the 13th Amendment, which bans slavery, and the 15th, which prohibits the government from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude, the 14th Amendment is fundamental to the whole country's long walk toward human rights and equality under the law.

The citizenship clause came as a response to the prevailing legal sentiment in 1868 -- particularly in the South -- which specifically challenged the right of freed Africans to be citizens. The provision intentionally freed the new Americans from the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that people of African descent, particularly if they had ever been enslaved or descended from anyone who had been enslaved, were not entitled to the privileges of U.S. citizenship. The provision, along with other sections of the amendment, attempted to protect the new Americans from having to live under oppressive “black codes,” which restricted access to certain areas and which required African-Americans to carry passes or documentation of their status.

Read more @ Counterpunch

tags: immigration

Related articles by Zemanta

• Republicans Putting on 14th Amendment Dog and Pony Show (alternet.org)
• Summary of the 27 Amendments to the United States Constitution (brighthub.com)
• The GOP's Dangerous Plan to Revise the 14th Amendment (theroot.com)
• Why repealing the 14th amendment will reopen racial wounds (thegrio.com)
• Doug Kendall: Celebrating the Women's Vote Amendment in the Age of the Tea Party (huffingtonpost.com)
• France and the myth of liberté, égalité, fraternité

Ghetto Book Notes: How Jews Became White Folks by Karen Brodkin

See also:


• The NAACP and their Jewish Friends

How Jews Became White Folks--This book is a good account of Jewish-black relations in the USA. The basic argument is that Jews, as marginal white people, moved up the social economic ladder by standing on and walking over black Americans who were systematically denied access to US government-sponsored wealth creation schemes that were suddenly cast open to Jews. This allowed Jews to move into the ranks of the white middle class that was just beginning to burgeon. Black americans, on the other hand, were, as i call it, bottom stuck.

So how, you might ask, is this different from how other immigrant groups have benefitted from black American oppression? What is distinctive about the social history of Jewish American/African American relations is the high degree of social and political intimacy between Jews and Blacks in US history. 


For example, the NAACP was not a black organization. It did not have a black president until the 1970s. Prior to that time the NAACP was headed by Jews, the Spingarns. Joel Spingarn, former Jewish head of the NAACP, doubled as a spy for US Army intelligence--I believe he held the rank of Major. He spied on black people for white people. Can you imagine the Jewish Defense League (JDL) having an African American president? Can you imagine the JDL having an African American bending their policy toward black interests?

tags: jews, race, immigration

Kofi Adu-Brempong shot by University of Florida police: Update

Community members speak out on the University of Florida campus before marching over to the Board of Trustees meeting.

See also: Ghanaian University student shot in head

Gainesville, FL – Over 400 angry protesters – a coalition of students, local residents and university professors – rallied and marched to protest the racist police shooting of Kofi Adu-Brempong.

Adu-Brempong is an international graduate student from Ghana who was shot in the face by a University of Florida policeman. After receiving a call from a neighbor concerned that Adu-Brempong was screaming, due to stress over his studies and his immigration status, campus police stormed his apartment, tased him three times and then shot him in the face with an assault rifle.

Adu-Brempong is hospitalized in critical condition, having lost his tongue and jaw. Incredibly, the police action took less than 30 seconds. Having suffered a case of childhood polio, Adu-Brempong was unable to walk without a cane. To add to the outrage, the University of Florida police charged him with a felony for ‘resisting arrest with violence.’

Gainesville Area Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led the campus action. Beginning with a rally and speakers at Turlington Plaza, the mass of protesters marched through campus to the Board of Trustees in the Emerson Hall Alumni Building. The Board of Trustees governs the entire university. Since the building was closed to the public, the protesters pulled the doors open, pushed past security and took over the building.

They presented the board with a list of demands, including dropping all charges against Kofi Adu-Brempong. The other important demand is the firing of Keith Smith, the officer who shot Kofi in the face. In 2008, Keith Smith was given a verbal warning by the Gainesville city police department where he previously worked. Smith and three other police officers were throwing eggs and harassing African Americans in the local community. The university police ignored this warning and hired Keith Smith.

Read more @ » kofi adu-brempong. NEGOTIATION IS OVER!

tags: police brutality, florida, ghana, immigration

Ghanaian University of Florida student shot in head by police (via Adia Benton)

Posted by the ghetto intellectual on 3/15/2010

Andrew Stanfill/Special to the Sun

James Abdale, a crime scene investigator with the Alachua County Sheriff's Office, takes video of a police shield outside the apartment where UF doctoral student Kofi Adu-Brempong was shot by police Tuesday evening in Corry Village.

Staff report

Published: Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 8:38 a.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 8:38 a.m.

A University of Florida graduate student described as delusional but praised by his students remained hospitalized Wednesday after being shot Tuesday night by university police, who went to his apartment after getting a 911 call about someone inside screaming.

Excerpts from UPD report

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Excertps from UPD report on Monday visit to Kofi Adu-Brempong.

Kofi Adu-Brempong, a 35-year-old doctoral student in geography from Ghana, remained under police guard Wednesday night at Shands at the University of Florida.

Sources close to the investigation said he suffered a gunshot wound to his head or face. A report on his condition was not released Wednesday night, but another source said the wound was considered life-threatening.

Police reported that Adu-Brempong's colleagues said he was having delusions linked to fears that his student visa would be denied and that he had threatened officers with a knife and pipe before being shot. While several charges were filed against Adu-Brempong, including one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill, an Alachua County judge ruled Wednesday afternoon that there was not probable cause in the case.

The shooting, believed to be the first of a student by a UPD officer, surprised some of Adu-Brempong's neighbors and current and former students. They said Adu-Brempong had a childhood case of polio and needed a cane to walk, and they questioned why police using a Taser and beanbag gun were unable to subdue him.

The standoff started at 8:17 p.m. at Adu-Brempong's on-campus apartment at Corry Village. It began when a neighbor called 911 to report screaming in the apartment, UPD Capt. Jeff Holcomb said.

Read entire story @ the Gainesville Sun

tags: crime, education, ghana, immigration, police brutality