Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Immigrants on the move-are the Dems standing up with them?

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So depending on which media reports you believe, somewhere from 2500 to 7000 immigrant activists and allies rallied on Boston Common yesterday.  They were opposing the draconian immigration bill passed by the House and being considered by the Senate; among other things, this would have made it a felony to be an undocumented immigrant (currently a civil offense) and also made it a felony to assist ikllegal immigrants.  Organizers and social service providcers as felons–a lovely vision of America.  Fortunately, an alternative (co-authored by Ted Kennedy and John McCain) made progress int he Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday,a nd the draconian bill was dealt a setback.

What I’m wondering, though, is who was there among Democratic elected officials?

I wasn’t able to make it due to work, but I’ve seen pictures that include Felix Arroyo.  But were other MA leaders there?  Yes, this is a federal bill, but during the debate over in-state tuition, many Dems made excuses about how the issue needed to be dealt with by the feds.  Did any of them take this opportunity to press for a federal solution?  Or did they cower away from this “controversial” issue?

Anyone here know more?  Was anyone at the rally?

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  1. until I got on the train at Sullivan Sq. and saw all those people with signs….

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    Then I walked past the Common later, and it looked like a good sized group to me, and they were still building when I went by. 

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    Looked like a larger group to me than the last anti-war protest I went to….I was thinking that, about the major turnouts at these protests and wondered why we aren’t seeing that on all the other issues.  Then I realized these guys are fighting for the lives and their livelihoods on an entirely different level than your average anti-Iraq-war folks are. 

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    I attended the Capuano Town Hall on domestic surveillance that same night.  Someone at that meeting said that if it wasn’t for the Town Hall they would have been over on the Common, I think that was true for many of the group there.

    • We wouldn’t reward people for speeding or smoking pot so why should dems reward people who break the law and sneak into this country illeaglly only to drive down wadges for working people. 

      • On the one hand, I agree — illegal immigrants are violating the law and they are driving down wages for US citizens, all the while not paying their fair share of taxes.

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        But… they’re people.  Human beings.  Flesh and blood.  Worthy of dignity and respect.  They deserve a safe workplace and a fair wage just like the rest of us.  Their children deserve an education.  Most of them would be more than willing to pay taxes and bear the other burdens of citizenship if it were offered.

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        Personally, I think the best course of action is to ratched up the fines and prison time for the employers of illegal aliens over the span of a few years.  Sure, we’d pay more for hotel rooms, fruits and vegetables, restaurants tabs, and new homes.  But, tax revenues would go up, unemployment would go down, and with a smaller market for jobs, tUSA would look less attractive to illegal immigrants.  After all, why shouldn’t an American businessman who’s dodging taxes and not following labor laws go to jail?  Why should he have an unfair advantage over his honest competitors?

        • The IRS offers an ITIN (individual taxpayer identification number) for people who don’t have a social security number so that they can pay taxes. 

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          Here’s some info from Congressional Testimony:

          The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) created the ITIN on July 1, 1996, for foreign-born individuals who are required to file tax returns.  The ITIN, a nine-digit number similarly formatted like a Social Security Number (SSN), is issued only to individuals who are not eligible for an SSN.  Since the inception of the program, the IRS has issued nearly 6.9 million ITINs – 70% to Latino immigrants.  Over a million taxpayers reported wages of almost $7 billion and paid more than $305 million to the IRS in 2001 using the ITIN as their identifier.  More importantly, three-quarters of all ITINs issued were reflected in tax returns prompting Nina Olson, the Taxpayer Advocate, to refer to the ITIN population as a “very compliant sector of the U.S. taxpayer population.”

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          Additionally, according to the NYT in an article dated April 5, 2005 entitled “Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions” (April 5, 2005, sorry, need Lexis to find it). The Social Security Administration maintains an “earnings suspense file” (ESF) which is money from earnings by undocumented immigrants.  Here are some highlights of that file:

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          Starting in the late 1980’s, the Social Security Administration received a flood of W-2 earnings reports with incorrect — sometimes simply fictitious — Social Security numbers. It stashed them in what it calls the ”earnings suspense file” in the hope that someday it would figure out whom they belonged to.

          The file has been mushrooming ever since: $189 billion worth of wages ended up recorded in the suspense file over the 1990’s, two and a half times the amount of the 1980’s.

          In the current decade, the file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year [in total earnings], generating $6 billion to $7 billion in Social Security tax revenue and about $1.5 billion in Medicare taxes.

          In 2002 alone, the last year with figures released by the Social Security Administration, nine million W-2’s with incorrect Social Security numbers landed in the suspense file, accounting for $56 billion in earnings, or about 1.5 percent of total reported wages.

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          So it’s simply not true to say that “most of them are not paying taxes.”  If you go to any immigrant community in Massachusetts or elsewhere you can find people selling W-7 forms (to get an ITIN) for as much as $100 and immigrants buying them, for the priviledge of being able to pay their taxes. 

            • Last night on NPR (marketplace to be exact) Paul Krugman of the NYtimes called illegal immigrants a net drain on the economy.  Plus and more importantly they are driving down wages for our most vulnerable the working poor.  People say they do jobs Americans won’t do and that’s not true.  If they weren’t here companies would have to pay a higher wage for those jobs and therefore bringing up the quality of life for our working class.  They are also breaking the law and as a nation of laws we can not turn a blind eye to this.

      • I wish there was a legal mechanism to permit more people who want to come here and work hard for a better life for themselves and their families.  They deserve the same chance my family got.  I think people would go through the right channels if there weren’t some arbitrary and unfathomable barriers.

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        I had a friend to tried very hard to stay in the US and legally work.  He is from Mexico.  He has a university degree.  He is an excellent math teacher, and actually helped me to learn some programming in C. 

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        Although in the US legally on a tourist visa, he couldn’t legally work.  He returned to Mexico and tried to do the regular routes.  He tried to come in for some grad school, and other methods.  It seemed that every time you talked to a different clerk at the visa place there was an different and unfathomable reason he couldn’t get in legally.

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        Are we overwhelmed with Spanish-speaking math teachers?  We can’t afford to have more hard-working bilingual taxpayers?

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        And for many people, their kids were born here.  Ripping families apart would not be a route to success for these kids.

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        It isn’t as black & white as it may look to people who haven’t seen it first-hand. 

  2. Isn’t our country about providing opportunity to those who seek it?

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    Why don’t we allow them to stay and provide them the wonderful opportunity to work for Wal-Mart? 

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    For instance, allowing 11 million immigrants is really about big retailers(Wal-Mart) and other corporations that “want” workers at low-wages, isn’t it?

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    Such places of employment will make them work insanely long hours with hardly any labor protections.  Isn’t this in a way serving a special interest while depressing our economy?  Isn’t this unfair?  Isn’t this America promoting slave labor? 

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    The affect this will have on our economy is potentially depressing, thus widening the bridge farther between the rich and the poor, although I believe this has been going for a long while.

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    I’m not sure I framed it quite the way I wanted to, yet somehow I wanted to say we need equitable or responsible immigration reform, allowing immigrants the opportunity to get education and work-training to boost skill sets thus setting them on a path to even greater opportunities for them and their families. 

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    Wouldn’t this seem to lessen the burden on the economy, maybe even uplift it?  Or would it depress it more?  Wouldn’t it be the civil thing to do?  I hope I wasn’t too confusing.

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