Recently in Immigration Category

What has happened to our nation and our Constitutional order that allows such a question to be asked and deserve, no, require a response and analysis?

Over at Firedoglake, David Neiwert does an excellent job of describing the situation after a massive immigration raid in Iowa -- a raid that focused on the workers, while leaving the huge business that hired them alone.

The Education Sector's Kevin Carey debunks some myths about how immigration is affecting our schools:

But discussions about the education of immigrants are too often boiled down to simplistic narratives alleging that schools are being overwhelmed by a wave of primarily Mexican and often-undocumented immigrants who are difficult to teach because they can't speak English. A 2005 Urban Institute study finds that those ideas are at best over-simplified and at worse incorrect.

• First, most foreign-born students aren't Mexican.
• Second, the large majority of school-age children of immigrants aren't undocumented.
• Third, most children of immigrants are proficient in English.
• Fourth, most Limited English Proficient (LEP) students aren't foreign-born.

Via Atrios, it appears President George W. Bush was for a Spanish version of the U.S. national anthem before he was against it.

And, as Think Progress documents, in 1919 the U.S. government commissioned a Spanish-language version of the Star Spangled Banner.

I realize Republicans think they need to pander to their radical right wing base. But this "issue" really does not make a lot of sense.

Really, must we listen to lectures about family values from officials at top levels of a government that creates problems such as this one? As Alternet's Rachel Neumann writes:

Berly Feliz never got a chance to say goodbye to her eight-year old daughter, Virginia. Within hours of trying to be responsible and handing in some completed paperwork to the federal immigration headquarters in New York, she was handcuffed and deported to Honduras. The New York Times reports that there are tens of thousands of children left behind every year who lose a parent to deportation. Only the most hypocritical could find any "family values" in deporting parents who are guilty of nothing but wanting to be with their families and leaving children who often, as in Victoria's case, start to have troubles in school and mental health problems soon after their parents' departure.

In abundance.

The New York Times story to which Neumann links shows just how immoral this situation is:

After her 1996 marriage, when she applied for a green card, federal immigration officials not only issued her an official work authorization several times, but also allowed her husband, as an American citizen and new stepfather, to sponsor the teenage son she had left in Honduras.

Now that son, Cesar, is 24 and a lawful permanent resident with his own American child, while his mother is back where she began, without a job or her children.

"I don't have peace because I'm not with my little girl," she said in Spanish, breaking down. "I don't eat. I don't sleep. I can't be without her - I have no life."

The hardest part, she said, is that in telephone calls her daughter sometimes tells her, "You didn't take me with you; you're a bad person."

"I can't handle that," she said.

Tell me what values system would celebrate this result?