Category: Uncategorized

Javier Iribarren was one of four people who walked the final mile from Abilene to Haskell in solidarity with the Hazahzas and all mistreated immigrants. Following is his email in response to news of four more Hazahzas released.–gm

Dear Jay and all of you,

Great day indeed. I am humbled by the joy and by the enormity of the odds. I am humbled by your humility, courage and dedication, my dear friends. Last night, at home, after coming from the event honoring Dorinda alongside other feminists that have changed America, my heart became full thinking of all of you. Changing history means to talk the talk and walk the walk. It means above all to be walkers.

I want to tell the Hadahzas a few things:

We are walking
alongside you

Your fear
matters to us

Your future

Your children’s future

as important

as our future

as our children’s future

I ask for your forgiveness
from the deepest part of my heart
With the best of my soul
for taking so long
to walk alongside you
I love you

Broken homeland
Broken hearts
Broken tears
Broken promises

No more

I love you

You know where to find me my good friends

Javier Iribarren

Only Once in Texas History (2003) Have More Children Been Dropped

Press Release from Center for Public Policy Priorities

Austin, TX—Today the Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) announced that 17,078 fewer children will be covered by the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in May than in April. This is the second largest number of children ever to be disenrolled in one month, second only to immediately after state budget cuts in 2003. In September 2003, there were 507,259 Texas children enrolled in CHIP; with today’s announcement that number stands at 305,991, a drop of more than 201,000 children (39.7%) since that time.
“This drastic drop in CHIP coverage makes it even more urgent for the Senate to take up HB 109, legislation that overwhelmingly passed the House and would allow children to apply for CHIP once a year instead of twice, eliminate a 90-day waiting period for coverage, and let families deduct child care expenses when determining their eligibility,” said Anne Dunkelberg , Associate Director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities.

Currently legislation is also on the table that would direct the state to correct the problems plaguing enrollment for the CHIP and Children’s Medicaid programs.

“It is critical that the legislature also act to address delays in coverage, understaffing, and processing errors in both CHIP and Medicaid,” Dunkelberg said. “Thousands of children are getting dropped from health coverage and getting lost in the system. Even HB 109 will not be enough if there still aren’t enough staff to properly process applications and renewals.”

Also, below find two useful links, one to the Children’s Defense Fund’s report, In Harm’s Way, which tells the real stories of children who were denied CHIP coverage and the other to CPPP’s overview of state and federal health care policies.

In Harm’s Way report: “True Stories of Uninsured Texas Children,” Children’s Defense Fund.

Child Friendly? How Texas’ Policy Choices Affect Whether Children Get Enrolled and Stay Enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP (CPPP: 03/22/2007). This report illustrates the history and consequences of Texas’ policies related to children’s Medicaid and CHIP, using official state program data. It also summarizes national and state research on the effects of eligibility and enrollment policies, and explains how Texas policies compare to those of other states. The report was funded by the generous support of the Texas Association of Community Health Centers.

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / Z-Net / GlobalResistanceNetwork

Since this is the season for intensive pre-election-year planning, we have to be worried about the public relations victory achieved by the Minuteman Project in Arizona. In five weeks time, they have gone from “vigilante” to “brave and caring.” And in the process they have staged a powerful wedge issue for 2006.

The public relations success of the Minuteman Project shows up in a poll from Arizona that reports 57 percent approval for the border action, but please note first of all how nicely the question is asked: “The Minuteman Project is a group of citizen volunteers who have been patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border to watch for people coming into the United States illegally and reporting them to the U.S. Border Patrol. Do you support or oppose the Minuteman Project?”

The first line of challenge to the public relations victory of the Minuteman Project is to ask how the organization is best described: as a group of “citizen volunteers” or a group of “armed vigilantes”?

Standing next to the President of Mexico on March 23 — one week before the Arizona border action began — USA President George W Bush was asked about “those people who are hunting migrant people along the border” and he answered: “I’m against vigilantes in the United States of America. I’m for enforcing law in a rational way. That’s why you got a Border Patrol, and they ought to be in charge of enforcing the border.”

Never mind for the moment how Bush’s appeal to the principle of “rational law” along the USA border is a blatant contradiction to his dismissal of “rational law” everywhere else. Does the President this time have good reason to make his claim? Is the Minutemen Project a threat to “rational law”?

One way to determine if a person is acting as vigilante or volunteer is to see if the person is coordinating his or her law enforcement activities with relevant law enforcement agencies. Neighborhood Watch Committees for example operate under supervision of local police. Is this the same relationship we find between the Minuteman Project and the USA Border Patrol?

“The Border Patrol administration chose to have no contact with our project other than quickly responding when we reported an illegal crossing,” said one Minuteman vigilante in an interview with Sher Zieve.

“To be 100% straight up with you and your readers,” said another Minuteman vigilante in an interview with La Shawn Barber, “some of our folks are going to be armed. This is something that is really hard to understand if you have not worked near the border. Having a weapon is not only legal, it’s stupid not to have one. Most of the ranchers don’t go out without a pistol on their belt.”

So we have it from the horse’s mouth: the Minutemen (unlike your average neighborhood watch committee) were not operating under supervision or control of the relevant law enforcement agency, yet they were carrying weapons in an organized effort to enforce criminal law. Now what part of vigilante do we not understand?

To be sure, the Minutemen have so far operated a very disciplined vigilante activity, confining themselves strictly to observation and reporting. But they are armed vigilantes nevertheless, not simply “citizen volunteers” as characterized in the Arizona poll.

It is strange to google news reports about Minutemen and find so many headlines that reinforce their well-crafted “volunteer” image. It is doubly strange to wonder why the media behave this way in clear dismissal of the President’s preferred “vigilante” language.

If we consider the media’s widespread disregard for the President’s framework when he discourages vigilantism along the USA border yet recall their nearly unanimous adoption of his language when he called upon vigilantism in global arms inspection, we get a brand new theory for media bias. It was never the President himself that the media favored all those years, it was simply the vigilante attitude. When it comes to selling news, media love lawlessness best.

Indeed, if world audiences did not respond well to images of rogue tough guys taking law into their own hands, we would not have the current Governor of California to consider, who made a movie career playing to vigilante appeal and who now hopes he can achieve the same star power as an elected powerhouse. On that score alone, how could we argue that he is wrong?

Yet when Hollywood celebrates a vigilante for movie entertainment, they usually make sure that the hero is an underdog type who is beset by forces more powerful, well connected, and deadly. Therefore, in order for Schwarzenegger to trade on his image as vigilante hero along the Mexican border, dramatic formula requires him to adopt the Minuteman characterization of Mexican immigration as deadly foe. And this is where the moral structure of Minuteman vigilantism collapses into racist pandering, exploiting fearful images of collective evil on the move. In Hollywood terms, Schwarzenegger the politician is no Terminator. Instead he now offers a reprise of Birth of a Nation, the movie where the Klan rides in to save the USA from Negro rule.

When the Arizona poll asked what people thought about the Army reservist who held seven illegal immigrants at gunpoint at a highway rest stop, the results returned a significant wedge with 44 percent approving, 41 percent disapproving. Again, the phrasing of the question raises difficulties. When a person is described as an Army reservist, was he on duty or off? If he was off duty, what relevance is his status as a reservist? But if he was on duty why was HE arrested for aggravated assault? So we wonder why the question must describe the alleged perp as an “Army reservist”?

Both questions in the Arizona poll are phrased in ways that tend to pre-legitimize vigilante actors as either “citizen volunteers” or “Army reservists.” Yet responses to the question about the obviously criminal activity of the rest stop vigilante demonstrate that armed confrontation with illegal immigrants in America is capable of producing a significant wedge. So we must attend to this incubator of ugly politics before something more terrible grows.

An April 29 report from the Associated Press signals that Minuteman politics is being tested for Texas. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who is widely rumored to be considering a run for Governor says of the Minuteman Project that, “these people have shown a commitment and a caring that should be acknowledged here in the United States Senate.”

As Damu Smith counseled a gathering of Texas peace activists in February, these wedge issues work against progressives only when we lose our grip on the larger agendas. If progressives fail to meet people with comprehensive responses to the experience of common life, then the wedge issues begin to look like they are causes of political weakness, although they are only symptoms. Crime and security are palpable issues, but they need not generate politics of criminalization, suspicion, or crackdown.

Do progressives have inclusive answers when it comes to policies that will help workers and citizens feel better about their chances in the world? Do Texas progressives have something more significant to offer than the retirement of Republican hammer Tom DeLay?

Finally, it will be interesting to see if political passions for vigilante actions persist now tha
t th
e Minutemen have announced plans to go after employers who hire illegal immigrants. What this means, I fear, is not some transformative confrontation with corporate power, but busloads of workers heading South.

“Our federal government is not doing their job,” Schwarzenegger said. “It’s a shame that the private citizen has to go in there and start patrolling our borders.”

vig·i·lan·te n.

One who takes or advocates the taking of law enforcement into one’s own hands.

A member of a vigilance committee.

By Greg Moses

“Your article is insulting and incredibly naive,” writes a correspondent from Alaska in response to “Gringo Vigilantes.” Since I am an insult to all law abiding Americans, she suggests that I should move to Mexico City.

Well first of all, I think we can come down off that high horse about law abiding Americans. I know very few. Most folks I know try to get away with something that’s illegal. It could be as simple as speeding. Or a preference for cash transactions in order to avoid taxes. Maybe they have stories about how they engaged in underage drinking, faking a drivers license. Or maybe on a Saturday night they dabble in some illicit kind of high life. In fact, if law abiding Americans never broke laws, there would be no market for illegal immigrants in the first place. So I imagine that if I’m an offense to law abiding Americans, I don’t need to worry too much about the percentages.

“The Minutemen are there to stop ILLEGAL immigration,” says my Alaska reader. “What part of ILLEGAL do you not understand?” She reminds me that there are legal methods to seek immigration through visas and work permits. What’s wrong with asking people to immigrate legally so that we can know “who they are and where they are.”

On this point, I admit I have little to say. We do offer legal avenues for immigration and they should be preferred. I have not argued in favor of dismantling the border patrol or the federal immigration bureaucracy. There is a lot about the status quo that I have accepted. And this is a predictable feature of the civil rights framework. There is a lot about the status quo that it tends to accept.

“You used the term ‘VIGILANTE’ in a negative way, as if it is a bad thing,” but were I to consult the Spanish definition of vigilante, she suggests I would discover it simply means to be watchful, and that’s all that the Minutemen are doing, being watchful. They have not been accused of any violence whatsoever. “I am glad those VOLUNTEERS are there and if I could, I would be right there with them. YOU, and ALL Americans owe them a big ‘THANK YOU’ for doing freely, what our paid government employees have not been doing.”

Thank goodness the Minutemen have indeed conducted a disciplined vigilante action. They have been only watching, with no reports of any “hands on” activity whether violent or not. But as my correspondent makes clear, the kind of watching being done in this case is the kind of watching that government employees are paid to do, because watching for people who are breaking immigration laws is what border patrols are paid for. The MinuteMan Project is not a group of volunteers, despite what every copy desk in America may say.

The Minutemen count as vigilantes because they have deputized themselves to assist in the enforcement of criminal law without working under authority of paid law enforcement personnel. And I do mean to say that is a bad thing when people who are not duly authorized to enforce the law begin to deputize themselves to take law enforcement into their own hands. Compare Gov. Schwarzenegger’s description of the Minutemen to a dictionary definition of vigilante. Are they not taking law enforcement into their own hands by Schwarzenegger’s own admission?

I could remind my Alaska correspondent that there are also legal ways to apply for work as a federal immigration enforcer. There are ways to seek employment as a border patrol agent or as an immigration bureaucrat. For American citizens, there are ways to engage the political process on matters of immigration policies and border patrol budgets.

When borderland residents say that Minuteman presence has cut down on the sound of helicopters in the neighborhood, their testimony suggests that the vigilantes have displaced usual law enforcement practices. So these are some considerations that go into the mix as we debate the MinuteMan Project: it steps into criminal law enforcement without going through any process of authorization.

But there is another dimension to the question that rarely keeps a distance from the Minuteman talk about law. When vigilantes stake themselves along the Mexico border, are they really not enforcing a color line? From a civil rights perspective, vigilantes have a preference for the color line, and there is almost nothing about the MinuteMen Project that would lead one to believe they are any different.

In keeping with the tradition of vigilantes along the color line, my Alaska correspondent offers an argument that includes anti-Mexican sentiment:

You may want America to look like Mexico in the near future, but I do not want that for my posterity. In the past, immigrants have tried to assimilate into OUR culture. Not these interlopers. They want to retain their language, their lifestyle and their morals, and force US to accommodate them at the expense of our own language, lifestyle and morals.

Language, lifestyle, and morals. How in the world does one untangle these passionate motives from the vigilante talk about legality? In the end it is difficult to imagine that if language, lifestyle, and morals were not the real issues here that the question of legality would rise to the top in the first place. It is not the breaking of law per se that motivates these “sovereign citizens of the United States” but a more specific kind of threat: the threat of a future swallowed up into Mexican identity.

On the question of Mexican identity, I wish I could report that MinuteMan sympathizers expressed some wonderment and appreciation for the cultural and economic contributions made by Mexicans to the USA. It would be quite another constellation if we were hearing from vigilantes who acknowledged and appreciated Mexican heritage. But we don’t. So as my correspondent accuses me of “picking and choosing” which laws to obey, I can see that vigilantes have chosen laws that help them patrol the color line.

Will the vigilantes take their binoculars to the picking fields at harvest time and watch for labor law infringements upon migrant workers? Will they assist in enforcement of minimum wage? The list of laws about which the vigilantes are not being watchful suggests that they have made a choice. And their choice is not so much about a kind of law as it is about a kind of people.

But how well do the MinuteMen and their sympathizers know the Mexican people. It is a perfect question to ask this week. So we conclude this installment of replies to Gringo letters by providing the following link to reasons why Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo and why Gringos might want to join them.

Hasta luego.