Happy Thanksgiving, nation of the undocumented and their offspring! (A Gingrich post)

It's still Wednesday morning here in the Aloha State, but it's already Thanksgiving Day in Korea, so I might as well go ahead with what will pass as my Turkey Day post (though I might photoblog from my actually turkey dinner tomorrow, as I'm wont to do).

The New Yorker kicked off the holiday festivities with their yet another controversial cover this week, a reminder that even if they weren't illegal immigrants, they were undocumented.

Heck, I'm a Mayflower descendant (fourteenth and fifteenth generation from four voyagers) on one side of my family and I will proudly state that they entered North America without any papers. Never got them, either. Nor did they properly assimilate (they pretty much stuck with their own kind). Somewhere down the road I'm probably related to some other undocumented folks, but we won't get into that.

And that brings us to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has unexpectedly risen to the top of the heap in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. For months, it has been a tight race between Mitt Romney and whoever is not Mitt Romney, as conservatives who just can't stomach electing a closet moderate or a Mormon seek alternatives. And one by one they've championed losers.

Well, they weren't losers to start with. Rather they seemed to possess all the qualities prized by Tea Partiers and other conservatives (starting with, "He/She's not Mitt Romney"), but then their bright start fizzled out.

We had Sarah Palin (winning point: "She thinks like me!"; fizzling point: "She is dangerously uninformed — just like me."). Then Donald Trump (winning point: "He will prove Obama is a foreign-born Muslin!"; fizzling point: "He gave up on his search for the truth on Obama!"). Then Iowa straw poll winner Michele Bachmann (winning point: "No, she's the one who thinks like me!"; fizzling point: "Ooh, look! It's Rick Perry!"), followed by Rick Perry (winning point: "He's the quintessential Texas politician"; fizzling point: "Oh, crap, he's a Texas politician"). Rick Perry crashed and burned, allowing people to notice Herman Cain (winning point: "Nine-nine-nine"; fizzling point: women he worked with telling him, "Nein! Nein! Nein!")

And that brings us to Newt Gingrich (campaign slogan that sounds cool but actually makes little sense: "Old is Newt Again!"). This guy has actually managed to make it past Mitt Romney and hover in the low thirties. Lots of conservative voters love him for his tough talk against Obama and the Democrats, but moderate Republicans are kinda sort put off by some of his old school (medieval old) views on things. For starters, the little Dickens wants to bring back child labor. Give that fourth grader a mop, there are no free riders at this school!

There actually may be lots of Republican voters who agree with this position — for others' kids, like those in poverty, because, you know, it's a lack of work ethic instilled in nine-year-olds that's the problem in the inner city, not a lack of, you know, jobs and/or safe transportation to jobs.

I poke fun at Gingrich (I believe his campaign should run an ad essentially saying, "With a head this big, he's gotta be smart"), but I actually think were he somehow to make it to the White House, he is someone who could actually come up with the bold-stroke plans that would put the country back on the path of fiscal responsibility in a way that preserves much of what both Republicans and Democrats want — as he and then-President Clinton did in the mid-1990s, back before Bush43 trashed the budget with his tax cuts and misguided and grossly mismanaged war in Iraq.

Frontrunner Newt Gingrich shocks debate audience
when he states how big his next wife's rack should be.

But what I really want to say about Gingrich — and this is where it all ties in with the theme of immigration — is that he comes up with some principled and well considered ideas that buck the rest of his party (or at least the conservative wing). And he has done this with immigration.

Last night at Republican debate #892, which was to cover foreign policy, Newt spoke out in favor of compassionately dealing with undocumented residents, an issue that helped erode Governor Perry's popularity (the governor spoke out in favor of allowing those who came to the country illegally as children to get money for college).

From the Los Angeles Times:

And just like that, another GOP frontrunner is on the defensive after another debate. This time it's Newt Gingrich under the microscope after he seemed to advocate what critics call a form of amnesty for illegal immigrants.

The former House speaker weighed in during an exchange on illegal immigration and border security during Tuesday night's national security-focused debate on CNN.

"I do not believe that the people of the United States are going to take people who’ve been here for a quarter of a century ... [and] separate them from their families and expel them," Gingrich said. "I do believe we should control the border. I do believe we should have very severe penalties."

He continued, "I don't believe that the party that says it's the party of the family is going to say it’s going to destroy families that have been here for more than a quarter of a century. I'm prepared to take the heat in saying: Let's be humane in enforcing the law."

I do not support Newt's divorcing wife on her deathbed policy, but apparently I'm largely in agreement with him on immigration policy (penalties should be focused on the hiring of illegal immigrants, including imprisonment and heavy fines for the Americans who knowingly hire them). And I know that among Democrats and left-of-center moderates like myself I'm not alone.

Watching all these debates I've come to this conclusion: If you could take select pieces of each of the Republican candidates and put them all together, you'd have one damned fine Democratic nominee.

Yup, you'd have Mitt Romney and his health care plan while governor of Massachusetts, you'd have former New Mexico Gary Johnson and Representative Ron Paul's marijuana policy, you'd have Rick Perry's handling of undocumented youth and now Newt Gingrich's compassionate but tough-and-pragmatic ideas about curbing illegal immigration, former Utah governor and US Ambassador to Beijing Jon Huntsman's eyes-open approach to China, Representative Michele Bachmann's recognition that Pakistan is "too nuclear to fail" (I really had to scrape to find something Democrats would like about Michele "unproven HPV vaccination causes retardation" Bachmann), and Rick Santorum's something I haven't figured out yet.

The problem, of course, is that each and every one of these positions earns them boos from the primary voters, even if they make them more electable during in November. Indeed, Newt Gingrich may find his fate sealed with a hiss as conservatives declare him the latest disappointment. I hope that's not true, though, since he makes an awful lot of sense on immigration and I don't want that viewpoint to become radioactive among GOP presidential hopefuls and the GOP congressional leadership, much in the way moderately raising taxes on the very rich to balance the budget has become.

Besides, who's left? We're still a month and a half from the first primary and all we have left from the debates are Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman (I like the latter but don't care much for the former). Will they be the next shooting stars? What if they rise and fall before January? Will Ron Paul finally be given a serious look (the guy's a kook)? Will they actually start inviting Gary Johnson to the debates?

The winner in Iowa and New Hampshire might very well be whoever is on top of the "not Romney" pile when the actual voting begins. Right about now, I'm guessing, Tim Pawlenty is trying to figure out how to get back into the race (recap: the guy quit because Michele Bachmann won that Iowa straw poll).

Happy Thanksgiving!

...

What if they threw a May Day parade and no one came?

That's pretty much what happened in Los Angeles:

By 10 a.m. only a few hundred immigrant rights and labor activists had gathered at Broadway and Olympic Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles to rally public support for legislation that would legalize the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants.

"It's really sad," Luis Ortiz, an ice cream vendor who has been coming to the rallies for the last 15 years, said of the small turnout. "I've sold very little, almost nothing."

I wonder if the right-wing media outlets will still run stories complaining that among the few that showed up people were "carrying flags of every nation except the USA." (Or maybe they'll complain that because the May Day rallies were so small, shoplifting didn't go down as much as with previous May Day rallies.)

The face of modern slavery in the sex industry

Writing in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof has a piece that illustrates how many women in the sex industry in America are not in it voluntarily, regardless of what many people — especially their customers — would like to believe. Nor are they necessarily illiterate dupes or drug addicts. He uses a Chosŏnjok (ethnic Korean in China) as an example of this "modern slavery":

Yumi Li (a nickname) grew up in a Korean area of northeastern China. After university, she became an accountant, but, restless and ambitious, she yearned to go abroad.

So she accepted an offer from a female jobs agent to be smuggled to New York and take up a job using her accounting skills and paying $5,000 a month. Yumi’s relatives had to sign documents pledging their homes as collateral if she did not pay back the $50,000 smugglers’ fee from her earnings.

Yumi set off for America with a fake South Korean passport. On arrival in New York, however, Yumi was ordered to work in a brothel.

“When they first mentioned prostitution, I thought I would go crazy,” Yumi told me. “I was thinking, ‘how can this happen to someone like me who is college-educated?’ ” Her voice trailed off, and she added: “I wanted to die.”

She says that the four men who ran the smuggling operation — all Chinese or South Koreans — took her into their office on 36th Street in Midtown Manhattan. They beat her with their fists (but did not hit her in the face, for that might damage her commercial value), gang-raped her and videotaped her naked in humiliating poses. For extra intimidation, they held a gun to her head.

If she continued to resist working as a prostitute, she says they told her, the video would be sent to her relatives and acquaintances back home. Relatives would be told that Yumi was a prostitute, and several of them would lose their homes as well.

Yumi caved. For the next three years, she says, she was one of about 20 Asian prostitutes working out of the office on 36th Street. Some of them worked voluntarily, she says, but others were forced and received no share in the money.

These stories are not new, but they bear repeating. Whether it's Filipinas or Russians in Korea or Japan, or Chinese or Koreans in America, there are some real tragedies behind the faces of prostitution.

President admits he's an illegal alien!

That was the headline probably carried by both Faux News and NewsMask.com regarding the story of one Pedro Ramirez, the president (of the Fresno State University student body) who admitted that he's an illegal alien.

Always read the fine print.

Mr Ramirez, whose family brought him to California when he was three years old, pays in-state tuition, which is the law of the land in California (and upheld by the State Supreme Court, which I have no problem with).

Oh, and speaking of tuition, while it's hard for University of California to get riled up for Vietnam War Era-style protests against the Iraq War or whatever, they will go postal over tuition increases:

UC San Francisco Police Chief Pamela Roskowski said the confrontation was potentially dangerous and defended the use of pepper spray against about 15 demonstrators. She also confirmed that one UC officer had drawn his service revolver when he was rushed by a crowd of demonstrators, one of whom grabbed the officer’s baton and hit him with it, she said. That officer and one other were slightly injured in the incidents. No shots were fired.

Nice. I used to be fond of calling such things the "Koreanization of America." Get the tear gas.

While we're stripping whole groups of US citizenship...

Apparently the idea of ending "anchor babies" and the perceived net loss of billions and billions of dollars they cause is all the rage in the K-blogs today.

There's this one at Chris in South Korea, another at Western Confucian, and it even got an honorable mention at The Marmot's Hole.

From The Western Confucian:

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution says nothing about "granting citizenship to every baby born on U.S. soil" much less imply that such is "fundamental tenet of the country's constitution." It simply grants citizenship to former slaves; that it mentioned "excluding Indians not taxed" suggests that those who maintain loyalties to other entities were not to be included.

To me, that's a bit of a specious argument. The part about "all persons born... in the United States" who are subject to US jurisdiction being US citizens is in Section 1, while the part about excluding Indians who are not taxed is in Section 2, which deals with counting people for representation in the government.

But I think there's one thing in the Fourteenth Amendment that's pretty clear about US citizenship: it's for those "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. Frankly, I think American citizens who live abroad and do not pay US taxes beyond a certain period after the age of majority — and who are therefore not subject to US jurisdiction — should no longer be considered US citizens.

That would include anchor babies who do not return to the US, but also long-term overseas residents. I think that's a much clearer interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Section 1 than the notion that "all persons" doesn't mean everybody.

That's my interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Think of all the money we could save on absentee voting for the millions of Americans who live abroad!

So give me the name of an American in Korea you don't care for and we'll set this baby in motion with a trial balloon.

Chandler 2.0

The Arizona immigration law that requires everyone to carry proof that they are in the US legally has a lot of people up in arms because of fears that it will result in racial profiling, with Hispanics (and Asians) in particular being targeted.

As this article in the Los Angeles Times reminds us about an incident I recall from the late 1990s, these fears may be well founded:

In late July 1997, police officers fanned out across this Phoenix suburb searching for illegal immigrants. Working side by side with Border Patrol agents, police demanded proof of citizenship from children walking home from school, grandmothers shopping at the market and employees driving to work.

At the end of what became known as the Chandler Roundup, 432 illegal immigrants had been arrested and deported. But during those five days, local police and federal officers also detained dozens of U.S. citizens and legal residents — often stopping them because they spoke Spanish or looked Mexican.

Now, as Arizona prepares to enact SB 1070, the controversial new immigration law, many of Chandler's Latino residents say they are reminded of those terrifying days — and fearful of a repeat of the past.

"SB 1070 just brought home the point: If you are Hispanic or Mexican, you are just not wanted in Arizona," said Joe Garcia, 65, a U.S. citizen who owned a video store in downtown Chandler and helped form a civil rights coalition to demand answers after the roundup.

The state attorney general later determined that authorities had engaged in racial profiling and violated the rights of residents.

I think I've stated before that if this law is enforced across the board — meaning that all gringos are also checked for their documents every time they are stopped for some lawful purpose and they are also detained or fined if they don't have their paperwork — then I don't have much of a problem with it.

But I'm not so confident that will happen. I'm also not so confident that excuses won't be made to "legally" stop someone for some other purpose when the law enforcement representative feels the person might be illegal based on their apparent ethnic background and they are merely looking for a pretext with which to check for documents under SB 1070.

Yeah, Marmot probably wouldn't be happy about this kind of thing

While Arizona is making everyone in the state carry documents showing they're in the country legally, Trenton, New Jersey, the capital of the Garden State (I say that without any irony; I've never visited, so I have no reason to dis) is going in the other direction.

From the New York Times:

Since moving to this city from her native Guatemala a decade ago, Herlinda, an illegal immigrant, has supported her family with restaurant work, but has had no way of proving that she lives here. Without government-issued photo identification, like a driver’s license or a passport, she said, she could not get treatment at most medical clinics, borrow a book from the library, pick up a package from a mail center or cash a check.

But this month she discovered a solution: a community identification card issued by a coalition of civic groups and endorsed by Trenton and Mercer County officials.

“When you don’t have a proper ID, they can humiliate you,” said Herlinda, 43, as she waited in the offices of a church where the cards were being issued. “I feel I belong in Trenton.”

As a new law in Arizona makes the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and spurs similar proposals in other states, Trenton is one of a small but growing number of municipalities that have moved in the opposite direction — making sure that illegal immigrants have documents to make their lives easier.

At least six city governments, including San Francisco and New Haven, now endorse or issue photo identification cards to residents. The latest is Princeton, N.J., where advocates for immigrants, with the consent of both the borough and the township, will begin issuing cards on May 22; other New Jersey communities have also expressed interest. Oakland, Calif., has approved a program but has not yet started issuing cards.

The issue is not new (driver licenses for undocumented residents emerged as a campaign issue in the latter part of this just past decade), and many people protest that "making life easier" is the exact opposite of what we should be doing for illegal immigrants.

From a law-and-order point-of-view, I get that (even though I think laws and policies to stop illegal immigration should first be vigorously enforced in the workplace, which goes to the heart of why almost all undocumented workers come to the US, it's easy to understand the concerns that making life easier elsewhere only undermines the efforts of law enforcement and the government — as meek as they typically seem to be — to put a dent in the overwhelming number of people who residing in the United States illegally).

From a public health and welfare stance, however, the opposite is true. Like it or not, millions of people are in the US illegally, and it becomes a health and safety hazard for all if they cannot get (or feel they cannot access) health care, insurance, or education. Communicable diseases have no regard for legal status or passport, so it's certainly not in our best interest to prevent illegals from getting adequate healthcare (and Obamacare goes so far as to bar undocumented residents from buying health insurance on exchanges, even with their own money). Likewise, having people on the road who cannot legally obtain car insurance, or children of illegal immigrants growing up within our borders without an education, is also fraught with trouble waiting to happen.

You see, you don't want to keep people away from activities that enhance social welfare: punishing them punishes us and only exacerbates the problems associated with illegal immigration. So from that perspective, these community IDs make sense (and laws like Arizona's that potentially require everyone to show their papers anytime the police walk by are problematic).

But more importantly, it underscores why workplace regulations should be Ground Zero for efforts to reduce their number: If there's one place we should be scaring undocumented residents away from, it's the workplace.