Immigrant Voices are Quieted
Bilingual sign. Source: http://tucsoncitizen.com
Critics of Arizona’s controversial anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, have voiced concerns that Arizona’s decision would prompt laws that limit the civil rights of immigrants to proliferate. Other states, including Ohio, have started looking at implementing laws similar to Arizona’s, but another type of immigrant unfriendly law has popped up in rural New York.
The small town of Jackson, New York passed a law in the wake of Arizona’s SB 1070 that has made English the town’s official language. The law requires that all town business, including that of elected officials, be conducted exclusively in English. Within the context of Jackson, where there is no grocery store or a large Spanish-speaking population, this law has created an exclusionary environment that limits the civil and cultural rights of immigrants who would potentially relocate to the area. The New York Civil Liberties Union has come out saying that Jackson’s law not only creates a hostile environment towards immigrants but also violates state and federal law.
Jackson’s law not only creates an environment of exclusion and violates civil and cultural rights, but also increases the acceptance of anti-immigrant sentiments and proliferates misunderstandings of immigrant communities, specifically the unwillingness to assimilate to so-call “American culture.” If communities are going to violate the civil and cultural rights of immigrants, than they should at least provide high quality ESL classes free of charge.
That’s all.
-Caitlin
Arizona SB 1070 – Update
Arizona citizens protesting SB 1070 outside the state capitol building. Source: www.hrw.org
Since Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer signed into law Senate Bill (SB) 1070, “The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” there has been a flurry of negative press.
Human Rights Watch has accused Arizona of violating the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the United States Senate ratified in 1994. Amnesty International has contested that SB 1070 not only violates the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, which the United States is party to, but also puts Hispanic immigrants in a situation where arbitrary arrest and detention are likely. The Huffington Post and the New York Times have both declared that the immigrant law violates civil rights and will likely lead to racial profiling. Even Arizona’s Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik, known for his ill-treatment of illegal immigrants, called the new law racist on Fox News.
All of this push back against Arizona’s newest immigration law has caused Kris W. Kobach, who helped draft the bill, to come out in support of the law. In his New York Times Op-Ed, Why Arizona Drew a Line, Kobach contends that the law is not only needed but just. To critics of SB 1070 he suggests that they read the law, which in my opinion will only cause more concern because of its unsubstantial wording. In response to claims that it is unfair to demand aliens carry documentation, Kobach cites a similar federal law that has been in existence since 1940. To critics concerned with the term “reasonable suspicion,” he also falls back on the federal government contending that federal courts have issued hundreds of opinions defining the meaning of these two words.
Yet, ultimately his conclusions are as ill-founded as SB 1070. It is not enough to cite federal court opinion concerning “reasonable suspicion” when the civil rights of United States citizens and those of immigrants are at stake. “Reasonable suspicion” will lead to racial profiling because the factors that make the case for “reasonable suspicion” are stereotypes. Giving law enforcement the power to demand immigration documents with “reasonable suspicion” and detain anyone without proper documentation only serves to increase civil rights violations.
The federal government must enact meaningful immigration reform that not only safely regulates immigrants within the United States but also takes into account trade disparities that cause people to emigrate in the first place before other states follow Arizona’s lead.
That’s all.
-Caitlin
Arizona’s Newest Immigration Law
Border fence in Yuma, Arizona. Source: www.zimbo.com
On Friday, April 23, 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law Senate Bill 1070, the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act. In doing so Governor Brewer signed into law the nation’s toughest bill on illegal immigration.
Illegal immigration in the United States, specifically persons from Mexico, became and has remained one of the most contentious political issues as of the turn of the 21st century. As a nation built on immigrants, immigration has been both crucial to the countries’ growth and a source of conflict. Yet, for the first time in United States’ history illegal immigrants outnumber legal immigrants and this has only increased anti-immigration sentiments. Illegal immigration has become even more of an issue in the past year due to the economic recession and the worsening violence along the border of the United States and Mexico.
When enforcing immigration laws, a major problem lies in the fact that illegal immigration is relatively invisible. Unless the person is already in custody, law enforcers cannot determine if someone is an illegal immigrant, legal immigrant or a citizen just by looking at them or asking for an ID. Arizona, which has an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants, has set out to change this with their newest immigration law.
This law will allow Arizona police to detain people they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. The law will also make it a crime for legal immigrants not to carry immigration documents and will allow residents to sue cities if they believe the law is not being enforced.
Source: www.nytimes.com
This new immigration law does not only crack down on illegal immigrants, but creates a situation where racial profiling of Hispanic citizens is inevitable. This law not only blatantly restricts the civil liberties and civil rights of Hispanic citizens, a concern President Obama voiced, but also has the taste of a Jim Crow era law.
We will have to wait to see the full implications of Arizona’s new immigration law and how it will affect illegal immigration. Yet, the passing of this law is a sign that the federal government needs to take on the issue of illegal immigration in order to protect the civil rights of American citizens and the country’s immigrant heritage.
Policymakers need to stop looking for ways to physically keep people out of the country, such as the ineffective border wall, and create more effective work programs for immigrant workers and actively help Mexico’s government to improve their country’s economic situation so their citizens have less incentive to emigrate. Potentially, the federal government could start by reevaluating the NAFTA regulation that has flooded the Mexican market with US produced corn and left Mexican farmers without a cash crop.
That’s all.
-Caitlin
The Right to Understand Your Food
www.worldcommunitycookbook.org
I just finished watching Robert Kenner’s film Food, Inc. for the second time and this time around it was just as unnerving. His film really pinpoints that our current food crisis is not only about food access, but the right to know what is in our food and the right to voice one’s opinion publicly about what we, not only as a nation but globally, are eating.
The fast food boom has not only changed how we eat, but how our food is produced. Because of fast food, Americans are not only fatter but our food landscape has also drastically changed since the 1950s from agrarian to industrial.
www.nytimes.com
Industrial agriculture is a system that is dependent on fossil fuels, causes extensive environmental degradation, is abusive to animals, puts economic power in the hands of a few, promotes food born illnesses and is directly correlated with the rise in diabetes. Yet, industrial agriculture is praised because it has given the United States an abundance of cheap, affordable food. Americans pay less for food now than any other period in history and any other nation in the world. This food, however, is only affordable because of extensive government farm subsidies that skew production towards a few crops, namely soy and corn. In short, industrialized food production is an unsustainable system whose opportunity costs far outweigh the initial cost benefits.
The ills of industrialized food are unnerving, but what is extremely disconcerting is how policy has diluted citizens’ rights to know what is in their food and to voice their opinion. The “Veggie Laws” are one example of policy that limits citizens from voicing their concerns about the industrial food system. Saying the wrong thing about food could lead to a lawsuit because of laws adopted to curtail negative comments about the food system, a fact Oprah Winfrey learned the hard way. Food libel laws, also known as food disparagement laws, limit consumers’ right to knowledge of what is in their food and ability to voice their concerns.
When contemplating how to combat and change this system, it seems impossible when voicing your concern could land you in court. However, there is hope and there has been some positive change, such as the growth of organics. What has and is going to continue to change the current food system is the consumer. As Kenner contends in Food, Inc., consumers vote three times a days for how food is produced.
In order to change industrial agriculture into a more natural, healthy and sustainable system, those with the means are going to have to vote with their dollar and those in power are going to have to give freedom of speech back to the citizens.
That’s all.
-Caitlin
Gendercide
Source: www.oxfamblogs.org
The Economist’s March 6th cover story, “Gendercide: What Happened to 100 Million Baby Girls?”, brought to the mainstream media the issue of gendercide, a term coined in Mary Anne Warren’s 1985 book, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection. Gendercide describes a gender-selective mass killing, specifically female infanticide in the terms of the Economist’s article.
Baby girls worldwide are subject to gender selective abortion or, in cases where families do not have the resources, death upon birth.
In China and northern India more than 120 boys are born for every 100 girls. Nature dictates a slight preference towards boys since they are more prone to die in infancy, but not this dramatically. Historically in societies that record births, birth rates have been roughly 103-106 boys to every 100 girls. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in 2020 China will have a population with 30-40 million more men than women. This presents a large challenge with many implications in a culture where a man’s social status and acceptance is closely tied to marriage and having a family.
The Economist cites three different reasons for this phenomena: the historical preference for males, declining fertility and the wide spread use of prenatal sex-determination. Curiously enough, government policy, like China’s one child policy, has been proven not to have too great an effect on the spread of female infanticide.
The continued and increasing incidents of female infanticide have grown into a gendercide that, like genocide, is not a regionalized issue. The three root causes of gendercide, historical male preference, declining fertility and prenatal sex-determination technology, are not regional issues, they are global trends. This is a global phenomena that is an extreme violation of human rights, specifically women’s rights in the sense that women, in this case female infants, are not equally valued.
Yet, the ultimate cost of gendercide, like all women’s rights violations, does not only affect women but all of society. The main side effect of gendercide is the drastic imbalance of sexually reproductive men and women. The implications of this are vast. A large population of men, young men, will remain without a mate. This historically creates turmoil in society in the form of crime, which is only exacerbated by a lack of jobs.
Gendercide is a human rights violation not only of women, but of humanity. The only way to start to reverse the trend is to increase global women’s rights, and by teaching and practicing the value of women.
That’s all.
-Caitlin
Congo Civilians: Who Will Protect Them?
Map provided by Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) made headlines on March 28th for the brutal killings of civilians by militant forces. Not only in the publications of Human Rights Watch, but also in the more mainstream media of The New York Times and the BBC. Yet, these headlines were delayed by close to three months despite the enormous civilian death toll.
Over a four day period in mid-December 2009, the 14th – 17th, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan rebel group know for their use of child soldiers, carried out an attack on the civilian population of the Makombo area, the northeastern region of the DRC . Human Rights Watch confirmed the LRA “killed more than 321 civilians and abducted more than 250 others, including at least 80 children.” Those killed were brutally massacre with machetes or sticks. The abducted were made to carry the goods the LRA pillaged from their villages and were tied up into human chains of five to 15 people. Those who could not keep up during the forced march were killed on the spot and left to rot on the trail, including children.
The Congo is no stranger to such blatant attacks on civilians. During Belgian colonial rule, King Leopold II, in his lust for power and rubber, carried out a genocidal campaign on the inhabitants of what is now known as the DRC. Turmoil continued in the country post-colonial rule and in 1996, after thousands of Hutu refugees flooded into the DRC after the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the country erupted in war while the rest of the world looked away. Even Congo’s workers, mining coltan, are not safe from human rights abuses or death.
The human rights abuses in the DRC are glaringly evident, but whose responsibility is it to protect the citizens?
The Congo’s government has thus far been largely unsuccessful at protecting the majority of its citizens, largely due to corruption and lack of resources. Thus, arguably it is the responsibility of the international community to step in to protect Congo’s civilians. Under the theory of the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), this is exactly what the international community should do. When a government cannot protect its citizens or refuses to, the country loses its right to sovereignty and the international community steps in via humanitarian intervention to protect the human rights of the citizens.
The international community has become increasingly involved in the DRC since the inception of MONCU, the United Nations mission to Congo, in 1999. However, this has been only a moderately successful mission due to understaffing. Most recently the international community, specifically the US, has financially backed the Ugandan and DRC governments in order to address the LRA by force. This tactic has been successful eliminating approximately 60% of the LRA.
Yet, the current actions of the international community, namely governing bodies, have not and will not succeed in protecting all of Congo’s citizens. In order to truly protect the human rights of DRC civilians, the international community cannot only commit financial resources but must commit more human resources. Unfortunately, it remains a politically risky move to deploy military combatants to a far off conflict on the African continent. Yet, R2P presents a theoretical and practical bases for humanitarian intervention that may slowly be turning the tides of resistance.
That’s all.
-Caitlin
Health Care: A Human Right?
Hello world! I finally decided to start blogging!
While thinking about what the heck I was going to ramble on about, I picked up Cass Sunstein’s “The Second Bill of Rights,” a book I have been reading here and there. The topic for my first blog entry nearly fell into my lap, health care as a human right. A slightly timely issue.
In his book, Sunstein discusses FDR’s proposal of a second bill of rights. A bill that would have extended the concept of rights in the United States from civil and political to include economic rights. FDR outlined eight rights imperative to achieving economic security, the sixth being the right to adequate medical care. FDR never saw his concept become law, but after his death, his wife Eleanor Roosevelt, as a member of the United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights, embedded his ideas into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
Even though FDR’s concept of economic rights, the right to adequate medical care being one of them, was solidified in the UDHR and the “International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,” which President Carter signed but the Senate has not ratified, the US government has not taken steps to formally adopt FDR’s views.
Throughout the health care debate, the issue of health care as a human right began to surface. Agencies such as Amnesty International and the NCCACP formally supported the view that access to affordable, adequate health care is a human right. From the platform of Article 25 of the UDHR that holds that every human being has the right to health, including health care, the human rights community contended that health care is a human right and thus urged for universal health care reform. On the flip side, the opposition to the health care as a human right debate argued that health care is a commodity not a human right. If either side won from the passage of health care reform, it was the opposition.
What the current health care reform achieves it not health care as a human right, but health care as commodity. This is health care reform meant to work within the framework of capitalism, not human rights. Even so, it is an encouraging step, one FDR would have supported and one that needed to be taken.
Human rights have always been and will continue to be a shaky issue for governments to fully embrace and promote. Civil and political rights work safely inside the framework of democracy and are not at risk for being condemned as socialist like economic rights, the category health care falls under.
Yet, I cannot stop wondering about the counterfactual. What if FDR would have succeed in implementing the second bill of rights and health care was just as much of a right in the United States as the right to bear arms. I think it is safe to say health care reform would have taken on a different tone on both sides of the aisle.
That’s all.
-Caitlin
