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Hispanics and Immigration: Marking a Decade

MÁS EN ESTA SECCIÓN

Fighting Sargassum

Community Colleges

COMPARTA ESTE CONTENIDO:

It was like a champagne cork popping, the 2000 U.S. Census revealed the new ‘largest-ethnic-minority’ in America was Hispanic, and that was received with merriment and the characteristic surprise of some in America suddenly awakened from their slumber.

 

As the decade unfolded the ones happily embracing Latinos were mostly retailers along with their marketing and advertising entourage all bidding for a chunk of the Hispanic’s approximately 1 trillion dollars worth of annual purchase power. 

During the first decade of the new millennium Hispanics quickly made it to ‘consumership’ rather than true citizenship.

Too quickly we greeted the appointment of the first Latino U.S. Attorney General in 2005 just to learn fairly quickly there was nothing to be proud of and realizing how some of the most appalling and wicked legal reasoning was concocted to justify torture. That Latino for the sake of decency should remain unnamed.

The immigration merry-go-round began perhaps with the “big bang” news of the growth of the Hispanic population.   After the initial celebratory mood tapered off, the Bush administration lured the Hispanic vote with the promise of immigration reform in 2004. 

Hispanics obliged, and along with the religious right-wing movement, single handedly re-elected George W. Bush tipping the scale of an otherwise evenly split vote.  Yes, Hispanics had a hand in allowing George W. Bush to mark this decade with privatized war and public safety, unfettered financial greed and recession.

Cleverly, Republicans played ‘immigration’ as a wedge issue, and they succeeded.   While President Bush insisted his heart went to the immigrants, his administration carried out the most expensive and repressive clampdown on record.

The House of Representatives passed draconian legislative proposals such as the infamous Sensenbrenner Bill H.R. 4437, in 2005 to simultaneously tackle terrorism and illegal immigration, as if they were two sides of the same coin.

That bill became the proverbial ‘straw that broke the camels back’, immigrants, Hispanics at large, took to the streets no to riot but to peacefully march in 2006.

What began in Philadelphia on Valentine’s Day as a symbolic gesture at Independence Mall, by a daring thousand Latinos showing their chutzpah, turned into the hundreds-of-thousands-strong marches in Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver and New York.

Following a similar script the merry-go-round repeated its cycle when in 2008 then candidate Barak Obama lured Hispanics with a promise of delivering immigration reform.  Now President Obama, after delighting the Hispanic community by appointing Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latino Justice in the Supreme Court, still keeps the pressure on by raiding immigrants and splitting families.

The latest botched terrorist attack will definitely claim immigrants, Hispanic at large, as the necessary scapegoat to calm public uproar to shut the doors and keep strangers out of our nation.

America was always lulled by money.  Tourist, student, and resident visas are graciously granted to tycoons, third world dictators and corrupt bankers siphoning millions of dollars embezzled from their countries into the U.S., that was the case of the 9/11 attackers, the Bin Laden family, and is true today of the Nigerian son of a wealthy banker.

We know all too well that most of our Hispanic relatives arbitrarily get turned down when applying even for tourist visas.   Paraplegic, ailing and old grandmothers are turned down from receiving a visa to visit relatives in the U.S. for fear that they might stay.

Yes terror also marked this decade, along with tsunamis and influenza, yet millions of immigrants have nothing to do with it, but will bear the full brunt of our paranoia. 

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