Give Me Your Wired, Keep Your Poor: The New Welcome Mat for High Tech Immigrants

Written by Rev. David L. Ostendorf

Recent bipartisan action by the House Judiciary Committee to approve more high-skilled, high-tech immigrants from China and India into the US reveals, once again, the crass – indeed class – politics of Congressional immigration policy gridlock.

The ironically named “Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act” passed out of Committee with nary a peep of opposition from its fiercely anti-immigrant members.  Chairman Lamar (“Deport ‘Em All) Smith himself waxed eloquent about the need for immigrant “professionals with advanced degrees and aliens of exceptional ability”; Iowa’s Steve King raised obligatory questions to varnish his anti-immigrant credentials, but eventually kept his quiet.  Democrats joined the Republican choir, and thereby made the… Read more

Unmasked: Rick Perry, Racism, and the Anti-Immigrant States’ Rights Movement

Written by Rev. David L. Ostendorf

With a single quick-lips shot to his right foot, Rick Perry wounded his presidential ambitions, confounded his conservative base, and – most significantly – unmasked once again the racism of the anti-immigrant, states’ rights movement.

Defending his support of in-state tuition for children of undocumented immigrants during the Tampa tea party debate last month, Perry pitched his own mantra to an audience and a movement wedded only to the Jim Crow version of states’ rights—the version aimed at keeping immigrants and people of color out of voting booths and, ideally, out of the country. Alabama, “Yes!”—states have the right and obligation to kick out and keep out undesired immigrants. Texas, “No!”—states do… Read more

Muslims, in the Crucible of Race, Religious Bigotry, and New Possibilities

Written by Rev. David L. Ostendorf

Minnesota has the largest number of Somali refugees in the U.S., with thousands living in Michele Bachmann’s Sixth Congressional District. African and Muslim, the Somali community is here thrust into the crucible of race and religious bigotry, mirroring daily the challenges facing Muslims across the country in the post-9/11 era.  While Bachmann stirs up the struggle taking place in that dangerous crucible, her Muslim, African American, Congressional colleague next door—Keith Ellison of Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District—seeks a more democratic and racially just future.

Self-proclaimed head of the Congressional “Tea Party Caucus,” Bachmann’s run for the White House has thoroughly revealed the hardened conservative politics that have kept her in office.  Her evangelical… Read more

A Brave New World: President Names Arizona’s Sheriff Arpaio to Head Homeland Security, Plans Mass Deportation Program

Written by Rev. David L. Ostendorf

Washington, February 16, 2012—President Perry announced today that controversial Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio will head the Department of Homeland Security in his new Administration.  “Sheriff Joe is one of the finest law enforcement officers in the nation,” the President said, “and will put real teeth into my new Illegal Immigrant Deportation Program.”

Perry tapped Arpaio for his advice on immigration enforcement beginning with a phone conversation early on in his campaign. The President noted that he “had always admired Sheriff Joe’s tough enforcement practices and his mass jailing of illegals.”   The Sheriff’s practices were the subject of a US Department of Justice lawsuit in 2010, focusing on alleged national… Read more

Hooded Sweatshirts, Shopping Carts, & Walking to Work: How to Profile an Undocumented Person, via the Ozarks Minutemen

Written by Rev. David L. Ostendorf

In Springfield, Missouri, the Ozarks Minutemen suggest that “illegal aliens” can be identified by their “use of shopping carts to transport goods or carrying groceries long distances, store to home.”  Other identifiers include walking to work, walking with your head down, or wearing a hooded sweatshirt on a hot day.

Seriously? Yes, seriously.

The ever-diligent Minutemen are pushing a Springfield city ordinance to prohibit local businesses “specifically” from hiring “illegal aliens” and to require businesses to participate in the federal E-Verify program.  Based on certification of some 2,400 petition signatures, the ordinance has been considered at packed Council meetings in recent weeks and is scheduled for a… Read more

Government Cleansing: Immigrants Get Hammered

Written by Rev. David L. Ostendorf

In the relatively quiet summer weeks of August, elements of the Obama Administration have hammered immigrants.

On August 11 the obscure Board of Immigration Appeals at the Department of Justice ruled that immigrants arrested without warrants no longer have to be told of their basic rights to remain silent or to an attorney until they are put into the formal deportation process, which is a reversal of policy in place since 1980. As a colleague at the American Immigration Council declared, “The decision epitomizes the substandard system of justice that’s been created and imposed on immigrants in the United States.”

On August 9 the National Labor Relations Board Read more

Race and The Race to the Bottom

Written by Rev. David L. Ostendorf

In a restaurant in Kirksville, Missouri, a recently-fired immigrant worker made $400 for seventy-two hours of work per week. Seventy-two hours. $400 per 72-hour week.

It took Maria Rivas forty years of hard work to earn her way up to $11.40 an hour at the turkey processing plant in West Liberty, Iowa. Forty years. $11.40 an hour.

For over fifty years the unemployment rate for Blacks has held fairly steady at twice the unemployment rate for whites. Fifty years. Twice the unemployment rate.

The story is endless. As the inane debt debacle in Washington draws to a close, and as the Tea-Partied Congress fails once again to do anything about the nation’s economic travails, there is… Read more

Barriers to Ballots: Republicans Brazenly Suppress Voter Rights

Written by Rev. David L. Ostendorf

If you believe folk in your community should have the right to vote without a “photo please” demand at their polling place, read on.

In a frenzy of political deconstruction four decades after President

Politics

Race, and the Race for 2012

Written by Rev. David L. Ostendorf

As the race for 2012 heats up, and as showcase “debates” proliferate to select the Republican challenger to President Obama, countless questions on race linger unspoken by media interlocutors and pundits.  Here are a few for consideration.

To Mitt Romney: You have expressed untold times that job creation is the primary issue before the nation.  Black unemployment stands at an unconscionable level of 17%, double the rate for whites, and Black teenage unemployment is at 38%.  What would you do as President to address this crisis?

Politics

Contract Workers in the Belly of the Food System

Written by Rev. David L. Ostendorf

A block-long tent city of pickets and placards lines a main thoroughfare on the south side of Minneapolis, just off  the property of a huge Cub Food supermarket.  Hunger strikers supporting low-wage contract food system workers underscore the irony of the setting.  Otherwise unknown and unheralded grocery store floor cleaners, who work nights for $8 an hour, have here taken a stand against exploitation.

Organized by Centro de Tabajadores Unidos en Lucha, the workers are taking on one of the largest food chains in the metro Twin Cities, calling it to accountability for its contact with Carlson Building Maintenance, the janitorial service that employs the floor cleaners.  The company, not surprisingly,… Read more