A Plea to President-Elect Obama: Stop the Raids

As the ballots were counted and the reality of a Democratic administration begins to sink in, the pro-migrant community is thinking about what might happen after January 20.  Comprehensive reform is on our minds.  But probably the most urgent concern is the immigration raids that have been destroying immigrant communities around the country, sowing heartache in thousands of families and causing so much needless pain.

How did we get to where we are?  And how can we get out of the destructive enforcement-only pattern we seem to be stuck in?

In the wake of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security was created and given an expanding multi-billion dollar budget.  What exactly that budget is for is not entirely clear when reviewing the bewildering array of subdepartments that were shoehorned into the DHS chimera.

It turned out it wasn't for responding to domestic emergencies.

Given that none of the domestic terror cells panned out quite the way the homeland defense apparatus had expected (remember the four Chinese terror-chemists who turned out to be migrant farmers or the ninja-star-throwing, Sears-Tower-wannabe-bombing doofuses in Miami?), DHS needed another plan, another way to justify the billions a weak-minded, toadying Congress had shoveled into its coffers.  Building a wall across hundreds of miles of desert can only burn up so much cash.

Meanwhile, Nacho Tancredo was rallying his mighty band of underpants gnomes and 80-year-old internet fighter pilots to shoot down comprehensive immigration reform (CIR).  This upset George Bush, who had envisioned CIR as a key component of his beloved legacy.  In a fit of petulance, he decided to punish both the business community who failed to support his plan staunchly enough and the migrants he was supposed to be saving, capitulating entirely to the "deport-them-all" wing of conservatism by initiating a program of massive immigration raids.

This approach had the added benefit of giving DHS a raison d'etre--to protect hardworking Americans from the invading brown hordes, and stymie the occasional imaginary terrorist trying to sneak in disguised as Jose Cuervo.

Without 9/11, the raids would not be happening.  But vague fear of a brown-skinned "other" means that our government is locking up and deporting thousands of factory-workers and seamstresses--convenient, though unconvincing, stand-ins for Osama bin Laden.

That is the background for the raids; the consequences are broken families and shattered dreams.

My request to President Obama is this: Stop breaking up families, stop the raids.  Immigration raids don't make us safer, they waste taxpayer money, and they destroy the lives of immigrants and their children.

Put aggressive internal enforcement on hold until comprehensive reform is passed.  The current situation is exactly what nativists have been dreaming about since the Reagan amnesty.  It's no compromise, it's capitulation.  Comprehensive reform should be a prerequisite for internal enforcement, not the other way around.

[Image courtesy of Slublog.  I can never use this picture enough.]