weaving: on hilary clinton for sec of state, US foreign policy leads to US immigration problems

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The F Word: The Politics of Perception

US Secretary of State: A Cautionary Tale

For some, whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, it does not matter or pinch their consciences what happens to subsistence level indigenous farmers in a small town in Mexico. (Nor do they want to look at the direct consequences to their own communities when millions of Mexicans over the past 14 years have streamed over the border to the United States to escape from the economic and political harms that have inflicted them since the enactment of NAFTA.) So let me please tell you another story that should hit anyone of the most minimal conscience a bit closer to home

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There are those who claim that Senator Clinton is a "champion" of human rights, based on a solitary speech she gave in September of 1995 to the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, China, because her most quoted soundbite from that speech was "women's rights are human rights."
Nobody - certainly not this correspondent - takes issue with that truth: Women's rights are human rights, as are men's rights, children's rights, minority rights, and everybody else's. But if a politician doesn't have a basic understanding of what human rights are to begin with, and has shrunk from the duty to defend them time and time again even when they have hit close to home, that politician is not going to be able and ready to extend them to any gender or demographic.
In Latin America, as everywhere, the doctrine of Human Rights, begun in the Carter administration but left to atrophy by all administrations since, walks hand in hand with any pro-democracy agenda. When human rights are deprived as part and parcel of state terror campaigns against peaceful dissidents, labor, environmental and other community organizers, the chilling effect on all free speech and freedom of association makes democracy impossible.MORE

Accidental Americans: Our Immigrant Labor Force

How about a new comprehensive, humane plan for immigration? While president-elect Barack Obama acknowledges that the US economy depends on millions of undocumented workers living in the shadows, the issue of immigration reform has itself remained in the shadows. The question of how attitudes toward 11.9 million undocumented immigrant workers will or or won't change in a workplace of diminished opportunities for everyone needs to be called. Well, there are those with a progressive plan and a new method of presenting the issue to the public. The idea is to change the frame that the Right has constructed, where immigration = border security and immigrant = criminal. The approach is to get up close and personal - talking about the experience of migration with a view to encourage policy that is responsive to people’s needs, rather than political jockeying.
The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization looks at the big ideas embeded in our immigration policy, about who is and can be an American. We welcome co-author, Rinku Sen, executive director of ARC, the Applied Research Center and publisher of Colorlines magazine; her co-author and one of the heroes of the book, Fekkak Mamdouh, a restaurant worker and union activist at the Windows on the World restaurant at the World Trade Center who organized the workers after that crisis; and Mamdouh's partner, Saru Jayaraman, an attorney, activist and professor. They co-founded ROC: Restaurant Opportunities Centers United which has set out to represent what they say is the some 40% of NYC's restaurant workers who are undocumented.