The Obama Administration is deporting more people than the Bush administration while he gets hammered and blamed for all the border problems. Hispanic families are being torn apart. This idea is not new and has been tried before leading to some of the most shameful chapters in American history. They say those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. I lived on the border for over ten years so I am more aware of the history of the border and perhaps can offer a little insight and reflection on the problem.
President Obama’s promise of change doesn’t apply across the board: The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency expects to deport about 400,000 people this fiscal year, almost 10 percent above the Bush administration’s total for 2008. Company audits have risen even more sharply, quadrupling since Bush’s final year. The changes are the result of Obama’s attempt to walk an impossibly fine line: winning Republican support for comprehensive immigration reform while appeasing Democrats who voted for his campaign promise to help immigrants. There have also been changes in who is arrested and how. The administration has been performing employer audits rather than the workplace raids popular during the Bush administration, and targeting deportable immigrants who have unrelated criminal convictions while explicitly disregarding illegal immigrants who are pregnant, ill, or primary caretakers. According to ICE’s director, John Morton, nearly 50 percent of the people deported this fiscal year have a criminal conviction, from driving without a license and DUI to major felonies, an increase of over 36,000 from last year. But the right has been criticizing the administration for focusing only on immigrants with criminal records and leaving others unmolested, while the left says too many otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants are still being deported.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/...
Hispanic families and immigrant advocates criticized President Barack Obama Thursday for failing to keep campaign promises to change the U.S. immigration system.
The critics questioned Obama's recent comment that he could not use his executive order powers to suspend deportations because doing so "would not conform with my appropriate role as president." Obama made the comment at a town hall organized by Univision TV network.
The statement has received a lot of attention in immigrant and some Latino communities. Hispanics voted heavily for Obama in 2008 and some have felt he has let Latino supporters down by failing to move an immigration bill providing legal status to some illegal immigrants, while deporting record numbers of immigrants, many of them Hispanics.
Eva Millona, executive director of Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Coalition, cited Obama's campaign promise made on July 13, 2008 at a National Council of La Raza conference.
"When communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel, when all that is happening, the system just isn't working and we need to change it," Obama said in the speech at the 2008 NCLR conference which is captured in video on the YouTube page of his campaign arm, Organizing for America.
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
Growing up in Tucson and then living on the border for over ten years gave me a personal insight into the border between the US and Mexico. I always ask people who scream we need to secure the border before we deal with immigration, have you ever been to the border? If anyone would drive the border for a few hundred miles, they would quickly learn that it is a ridiculous proposition. Politicians espousing such a proposition know that it will preclude ever talking about sane immigration policies, because it is an impossible task. I have hundreds of stories from my time living on the border. It’s good to get a feel for the border before making up our minds about what can be done.
The border's total length is 3,169 km (1,969 miles), according to figures given by the International Boundary and Water Commission.[1] It is the most frequently crossed international border in the world,[2][3][4] with approximately three hundred fifty million (350,000,000) crossings per year[5][3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
A 2,000 mile state-of-the-art border fence has been estimated to cost between four and eight billion dollars. Costs for a wall that would run the entire length of the border might be as low as $851 million for a standard 10-foot prison chain link fence topped by razor wire. For another $362 million, the fence could be electrified. A larger 12-foot tall, two-foot-thick concrete wall painted on both sides would run about $2 billion. Initially it was estimated that the San Diego fence would cost $14 million -- about $1 million a mile. The first 11 miles of the fence eventually cost $42 million -- $3.8 million per mile, and the last 3.5 miles may cost even more since they cover more difficult terrain. An additional $35 million to complete the final 3.5 miles was approved in 2005 by the Department of Homeland Security -- $10 million per mile.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/...
Even the way we acquired what makes up most of AZ and NM was fraught with controversy and violence. The Mexican people were so angry about the Gadsden purchase that they deposed Santa Anna.
As originally envisioned, the purchase would have encompassed a much larger region, extending far enough south to include most of the current Mexican states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas, as well as all of the Baja California peninsula. The Mexican people opposed such boundaries, as did anti-slavery U.S. Senators, who saw the purchase as acquisition of more slave territory. Even the sale of a relatively small strip of land angered the Mexican people, who saw Santa Anna's actions as a betrayal of their country. They watched in dismay as he squandered the funds generated by the Purchase. Contemporary Mexican historians continue to view the deal negatively and believe that it has defined the American-Mexican relationship in a deleterious way.[2]
This tract of nearly 30,000,000 acres cost Uncle Sam about thirty-three cents an acre.
The deal was so unpopular in Mexico that Santa Anna was unseated as dictator and banished. Gadsden was recalled as Minister to Mexico for mixing in Mexican politics and domestic affairs and did not live to see the Southern Pacific Railroad built through his purchase.
http://gadsdenpurchase.com/
The idea of simply rounding up all the undocumented immigrants is not a new one. It was tried a couple of other times and these are unsavory chapters in American history that have largely been ignored. The Mexican Repatriation came about mostly because of large scale unemployment because of the Depression, not unlike the anti immigrant sentiment prevailing today because of the scarcity of jobs following the crash of 2008.
The Mexican Repatriation refers to a forced migration that took place between 1929 and 1939, when as many as one million people of Mexican descent were forced or pressured to leave the US. (The term "Repatriation," though commonly used, is inaccurate, since approximately 60% of those driven out were minor dependents born in the U.S. and citizens under current interpretation.)[1] The event, carried out by American authorities, took place without due process.[2] The Immigration and Naturalization Service targeted Mexicans because of "the proximity of the Mexican border, the physical distinctiveness of mestizos, and easily identifiable barrios." [3]
The Repatriation is not widely discussed in American history textbooks;[4] in a 2006 survey of the nine most commonly used American history textbooks in the United States, four did not mention the Repatriation, and only one devoted more than half a page to the topic.[4] In total, they devoted four pages to the Repatriation, compared with eighteen pages for the Japanese American internment[4] which affected only one-tenth as many people.[1]
These actions were authorized by President Herbert Hoover and targeted areas with large Hispanic populations, mostly in California, Texas, Colorado, Illinois and Michigan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The federal government has not apologized for the repatriations. In 2006, representatives Hilda Solis and Luis Gutiérrez introduced a bill calling for a commission to study the issue, and called for an apology.
The state of California was the first state to apologize when it passed the "Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program" in 2005, officially recognizing the "unconstitutional removal and coerced emigration of United States citizens and legal residents of Mexican descent" and apologizing to residents of California "for the fundamental violations of their basic civil liberties and constitutional rights committed during the period of illegal deportation and coerced emigration."
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/...
Operation Wetback was a 1954 operation by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to remove about one million illegal aliens from the southwestern United States, focusing on Mexican nationals[1].
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
There are many sad stories connected to both of these deportation efforts. You hear many people saying today, just round them up and send them all back. Are we really anxious to repeat some of the most shameful acts of the past? One of my favorite books has always been A Roadside History of Arizona by Marshall Trimble, the AZ state historian. I think history tells us a lot about the present. It’s good for understanding how we got to where we are now. IMO the Obama administration is making a mistake that has been made before and will cause untold harm to many people. He is trying to solve a problem that hasn't been solved in the past by repeating the same actions. There must be a better way.