ANDREW MOSS

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It’s also a painful reminder that our democracy, already undermined by the disproportionate power of moneyed interests, is obstructed by the silent stranglehold of the filibuster. The result has not been gridlock, as has been commonly claimed, but rather a stranglehold on democracy by a powerful minority. Yet they are essentially disenfranchised – without the power that citizenship and voting confer. Immigrant rights advocates will certainly continue trying other avenues, pushing as hard as possible for a true path forward to citizenship. In the meantime, let it be fully recognized that the denial of immigrant rights – including the right to full representation – is inextricably linked to the denial of all our rights: citizen and non-citizen alike.

By Andrew MossIt’s easy to say, “our immigration system is broken.” Or to declare: “we are a nation of immigrants.”But neither description goes very far to explain the realities of immigration and immigration policy in America. Then, on August 19, another Texas judge blocked the immigration enforcement priorities set by the Biden administration earlier this year, priorities that would have pivoted sharply from the open-ended targeting of immigrants by the Trump administration. In memoranda issued in January and February, the administration spelled out its priorities for immigration enforcement, directing the government’s attention to individuals who pose a threat to national security or public safety, or who entered the country after November 1, 2020. You will also hear appeals to fear: fear of the Other, fear generated to serve political ambitions. If a path to citizenship can indeed be opened for the first time in 35 years, it will not mark the end of these debates, nor the end of the struggle over national identity.

The issue of representativeness is grounded in economic facts and in the realities of daily life for both undocumented immigrants and documented noncitizens (i.e. For many years, undocumented immigrants have paid billions in federal, state, and local taxes, and many pay into Social Security as well, even though they’re not eligible to receive retirement benefits. Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson tells his views and readers, “If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. What do you say to any one of the five million undocumented immigrants deemed as “essential workers” – people working in construction, agriculture, food manufacturing, and health care? Citizenship, and the voting rights that go with it, are ultimately issues of agency, power, and voice.

By Andrew MossAs with many issues raised by this pandemic, the problem of hazard pay is fraught with deep, multiple inequities. This past spring, large retail chains like Walmart, Kroger, and Amazon introduced hazard pay under a variety of names (“Hero Pay,” “Appreciation Pay”), paying single bonuses or supplementing workers’ hourly wages by up to $2 per hour. As the Brookings researchers noted, Black and Latinx workers make up a disproportionate number of low-wage, frontline, essential workers (i.e. Black workers in 2018 constituting 13 percent of all workers, but 19 percent of low-wage workers; Latinx workers making up 16 percent of the U.S. workforce, but 22 percent of frontline, low-wage essential workers). As the Brookings researchers described it, hazard pay is “a down payment on what should be permanent, lasting change through an increased minimum wage.”

It is called “structural,” or indirect, violence, and, as the name implies, it refers to violence that is embedded in social structures or institutions. But structural violence inflicts no less harm than its direct counterpart. It should not be overlooked that structural violence and systemic racism also overlap in numerous ways. And “structural violence” points to another important feature of this phenomenon: it is avoidable. Please think, then, of using the term structural violence as equivalent to turning on your car’s fog lights.

As we head into a new decade, it is useful to map the ongoing struggles in order to see the broader landscape of conflict, and there is one concept, that of the prison industrial complex (or PIC), that can help provide such a map. Finally, with many asylum seekers trapped in unsafe conditions in Mexico under the Remain in Mexico policy, its appropriate to include the construction of Donald Trumps border wall as part of immigrations prison industrial complex. Certainly, immigrations prison industrial complex predates the Trump administration. For-profit detention facilities date back to the early 1980s, and surveillance and the fortification of the border have been going on for years. As resistance to his policies continues, it will be helpful to invoke the concept of the prison industrial complex as a way of seeing the big picture.

The language is spoken by members of the Trump administration and its allies in the media and in restrictionist think tanks. Grounded in a narrative of threat from within and without, its a language that sanctions and rationalizes violence against immigrants. Inflammatory language has been central to Donald Trumps rhetoric since the day he announced his candidacy, declaring that Mexico is . By removing these priorities, the Trump administration widened the net of potential enforcement to all of the 10.7 million people living in the U.S. without documentation. I am undocumented, but that wont stop me from continuing to speak out and organize.Did you find apk for android?