Immigration

Two National Day of Action Events on May Day

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Carolyn Classen covered the People’s Climate March coming up on Saturday, so I will cover two events scheduled for Monday, May 1, or  “May Day.”

The lesser publicized event is the “Beyond the Moment March.” Activist groups are uniting under a broader coalition they’ve dubbed “The Majority,” more than 50 partners representing black, Latino, the indigenous, LGBTQ, refugees, immigrants, laborers and the poor will collaborate from April 4 through May 1, International Worker’s Day, when they’ll launch massive protests across the country.

The idea for the Beyond the Moment March was derived from the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, in which he spoke out against racism, materialism and militarism — all broader and more-inclusive themes than his earlier anti-Jim Crow campaigns. The coalition said it chose April 4 as the kickoff for political education because that is date that King delivered the speech in 1967 and the date on which he was assassinated a year later.

The action will “go beyond moments of outrage, beyond narrow concepts of sanctuary, and beyond barriers between communities that have much at stake and so much in common,” The Majority states on its BeyondtheMoment.org website. The “Beyond the Moment” initiative kicked off on April 4 with “serious political education with our bases,” according to the website. In the weeks leading up to the mass mobilizations on May 1, they will hold public teach-ins and workshops nationwide. The desired outcome is a “broad intersectional, cross-sectoral” and influential unity on the left, activists said. We will strike, rally and resist,” said the coalition.

For more information see Mic.com, Protest groups to unite as “The Majority” for massive actions across the country on May 1, and Alternet. Diverse Protest Groups Unite As ‘The Majority,’ Aiming for Large-Scale Demonstrations on May 1st.

The second more publicized event is the Rise Up! National Day of Action, which recalls the 2006 United States immigration reform protests that reached a climax on May 1, 2006, and were nicknamed “A day without Immigrants” after the film A Day Without a Mexican.

Thomas Kennedy writes at the Huffington Post (excerpt):

On May 1 in cities, towns, and communities across the country, hundreds of thousands of people will rise up in resistance to demonstrate the power, resilience, and strength of immigrant communities and progressives in America.

Keeping families together is an American value that must be defended with all the urgency and passion we can muster.

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Stock in Concrete Companies?

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Cross-posted from RestoreReason.com.

As a leader in the military, I learned a long time ago that if something was easy to fix, someone would have already fixed it. President Trump evidently hadn’t learned that prior to his election, but since then, has time and again realized that uh, YEAH, this shit is hard!

Take the border wall for example. It might have been good “red meat” for his supporters, but there are three good reasons why there is not a finished border wall along our southern border: 1) it is a very complicated endeavor, 2) it is really, really expensive, and 3) it won’t solve the problem of illegal immigration. I mean, get real! Trump isn’t the first politician to try to make hay with this issue, but the rhetoric always slams into reality eventually.

I knew for example in 2011, that Arizona Senator Steve Smith wasn’t going to get anywhere with his “www.BuildTheBorderFence.com” initiative and I was right. Smith promised to raise some $50 million to build a 15 foot fence at busy border-crossing points and erect fences where there were no federal fences. After three years however, the project had only raise $265,000, not even one-tenth of the $2.8 million needed to build the first mile of fencing. As for the $265,000, last I could find the advisory committee assigned to do something with the funding were asking sheriffs how they would use it.

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Federal judge issues nationwide preliminary inunction against Trump’s ‘sanctuary cities’ executive order

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Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and President Donald J. Trump believe Richard Nixon’s formulation that “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”.

Even a child with a fifth grade civics education knows that this is not true.

Today U.S. District Judge William Orrick III of San Francisco issued a nationwide preliminary injunction (.pdf) against Trump’s recent executive order seeking to coerce punish “sanctuary cites.”

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The Trump administration is now “oh for” in repeated immigration executive orders because they keep violating the constitution. Add this to his “100 days” list of failures.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports, Judge says Trump can’t punish cities over sanctuary city policies:

President Trump can’t coerce “sanctuary cities” like San Francisco to cooperate with immigration officers by withdrawing all of their federal funds, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

In the first legal test of an executive order Trump issued five days after taking office, U.S. District Judge William Orrick III of San Francisco said the president was exceeding his constitutional authority by trying to punish local governments that disagreed with his immigration policies.

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Trump backs off hostage demand because GOP fears blame for a government shutdown

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With a federal government shutdown looming on Friday at midnight unless a continuing resolution (CR) spending bill is passed before then, last week Donald Trump resorted to hostage taking to try to get his way for funds for his border wall and undermining “Obamacare” for millions of Americans. Trump to Democrats: Pay for My Wall, or Obamacare Gets It! This was followed by this ridiculous hostage demand:

[B]udget chief Mick Mulvaney explained in an interview with Bloomberg Friday, the administration is offering $1 of funding for Obamacare’s crucial cost-sharing reduction subsidies for every $1 of money Democrats pony up for the wall. Here’s the full quote:

We’ve finally boiled this negotiation down to something that we want very badly, that the Democrats really don’t like, and that’s the border wall. At the same time there’s something they want very badly that we don’t like very much, which are these cost sharing reductions, the Obamacare payments. Ordinarily, in a properly functioning Washington, D.C., as in any business, this would be the basis upon which a negotiated resolution could be achieved. The question is how much of our stuff do we have to get, how much of their stuff are they willing to take, and that’s the way it should work. That’s the way that we hope that it works. We offer them $1 of CSR payments for $1 of wall payments. Right now, that’s the offer that we’ve given to our Democratic colleagues. That should form the fundamental understading that gets us to a bipartisan agreement.

The implicit threat here is that, if Democrats reject this deal, the White House will cease making the subsidy payments, and likely bring Obamacare crashing down. It is not especially credible. Democratic leaders are already responding with snark: Before, Mexico was supposed to pay for the border wall. Now, Trump’s threatening the health care of millions to get taxpayers to cover it.

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President Trump’s border policy creates uncertainty

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For the year 2016, Arizona’s exports to Mexico totaled $8.3 billion, down from the $9.1 billion recorded in 2015. Arizona ranked fifth among the states exporting to Mexico in 2016, behind Texas, California, Michigan, and Illinois. The American economy is forecast to grow 2.3% in 2017. Economists have downgraded Mexico’s projected economic growth rate from approximately 2.5% to 1.5% mainly due to the uncertainty generated by the Trump administration’s anticipated policies. Since Mexico’s economic wellness depends in large part on its relations with the U.S., the country’s economic future looks a bit cloudy at this time.

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