With Civil and Human Rights Under Attack, Resistance Mounting

Written by Charlotte Williams

In spite of its checkered past, and current anti-immigrant legislation, the state of Georgia is a hotbed of acts of resistance to the anti-immigrant movement as organizing efforts and grassroots leadership training continues to gain ground.  Recently, some organizations came together to strategize around collective responses to anti-immigrant advances in Georgia and in other communities across the nation.

Seeking to identify common ground in addressing the anti-immigrant movement, The Center for New Community (CNC), SisterSong-Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, and the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) met in Georgia.  In part, the discussion focused on the intersections of the anti-immigrant movement and civil, human rights violations, and the… Read more

Cross-Post: So Much for the Nativists

Written by Imagine 2050 Editors

Originally published by The New York Times on October 26, 2011.

Here’s a Capitol riddle for you: Representative Lamar Smith, one of the most reflexively anti-immigrant hard-liners in Congress, is sponsoring a bill to flood the agriculture sector with up to half-a-million visas for guest workers. Understand why and you’re well on your way to unpacking the nation’s dysfunctional relationship with undocumented immigrants.

Mr. Smith, a Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has a bill to require every employer in the country to use E-Verify, the federal hiring database, and fire the workers it flags as unauthorized.

He says it will give American jobs back to Americans.

… Read more

Cross-Post: Occupy Wall Street protesters stripped of their power

Written by Imagine 2050 Editors

As freezing temperatures descend on the Northeast, reports emerge that the City has taken away the  protesters’ sources of power and heat.

The city has stripped Occupy Wall Street protesters of their power.

Dozens of firefighters and police officers entered Zuccotti Park Friday morning to confiscate generators and gas canisters.

Fire trucks and police vans pulled up on the corner of Broadway and Liberty St. at about 8:30 a.m. and asked the encamped demonstrators to bring the items to them, saying they were a health and fire hazard.

“They made an announcement on a bullhorn saying: ‘We are here to take the generators, could you please bring them up to us on the corner of

… Read more

FIRE Coalition, Immigration Tea Party and IRLI Member Host Event

Written by Imagine 2050 Editors

The anti-immigrant FIRE Coalition has formed a partnership with the Immigration Tea Party and Foreign National Crime Information Center and are holding a press conference on November 3rd The at the press conference, the groups will promote Rep. Walter Jones’ (R-NC) H.R. 3168, The Illegal Alien Crime Reporting Act of 2011, and designate November 6th as The National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Illegal Aliens.  They will also thank Steve King for proposing a bill that would make November 6th “The National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Illegal Aliens.” FIRE Coalition held an event last year with FAIR and State Legislators for Legal Immigration founder Daryl Metcalfe… Read more

Birther Rick Perry: Jokes & “Post-Racial” America

Written by Amy Spicer

In two recent interviews with Parade and the New York Times, Texas Governor Rick Perry, currently biding for the presidential GOP nomination, insisted that he was not certain that President Obama was born in the United States.

In a form of conspiracy-stoking that’s as well-trodden as it is insidious, Perry openly links himself to the birther movement. Bent on cultivating racial paranoia, the birther-movement placed the burden on our first African American president to prove what passed without query for our forty-three white presidents.

Perhaps it’s too obvious to say that the birthers’ insistence on Obama’s illegitimacy is based on racism. After all, aren’t we living in a post-racial America? And… Read more

Professor Jan Ting: Part of the Tanton Network’s Play for America’s College Campuses

Written by Catharine Debelle

Meet Jan Ting, a professor at Temple University’s School of Law who teaches courses on national security and immigration law.

As professors do, Ting publishes articles focusing on said specializations. For instance, in an article he published on October 23 that was condensed for the NY Times  website, Ting writes about the dangers of allowing unchecked immigration. Using a study by the Pew Research Center that states that the US population will grow to 438 million by 2050, an increase of 129 million post-2010, Ting argues that such a rise in population will create an ever-increasing number of problems for the US economy and the environment.

For example, with no… Read more

Cain V. Obama: Pondering the GOP’s Penchant for Adversarial Tokenism

Written by Imagine 2050 Editors

If you’re among those who think that Herman Cain is coming down to his last minutes of fleeting fame in the Republican Presidential race, and that the chances of his becoming The Candidate are slim to none, permit us to recall that stranger things have happened in campaigns circling Barack Obama.

In 2004 the imploding Illinois Republican Party – desperate for a candidate to take on Obama in the US Senate campaign – carpet-bagged the ultra-conservative Alan Keyes from Maryland to put up a stand against the rising Democratic star.  In a cynical nod to the dicey racial politics of the Obama candidacy, the state Party recruited its first-ever African American… Read more

Act! for America’s New Petition: Just More of the Same

Written by Brian Schultz

It’s beginning to look like nothing ever changes.

Last Thursday, the garden-variety Islamophobes at Act! for America circulated an email requesting its constituents to sign a petition, asking whether or not the respondent favors the widely used “American Laws for American Courts” model statute (ALAC). This effort, Act! claims, would gauge support for so-called “anti-Sharia” legislation that redundantly precludes any “foreign law” from consideration in the U.S. judiciary. Innocuous as this sounds, ALAC is but one of several efforts to emphatically exclude nonwhite, non-Christian denizens of the U.S. from the American legal tradition.

Act! and its founder, Brigitte Gabriel, are no strangers to ALAC or projects like it; they have become a household… Read more