New Haven Independent

Posted by: New Haven | June 8, 2007 8:34 AM

It is sad to see anyone frightened with the threat of deporting. Especially hard working people that are productive and hard working.

But the facts are the facts. They chose to come here illegaly. It was their choice. If we do not enforce these laws we may as well wipe the laws from the books and swing open the gates at the borders and let everyone in that wants to come in.

Posted by: Oh Please | June 8, 2007 12:54 PM

"The Thursday night demonstration was characterized by patient, even disciplined moral defiance; it well may turn out to be of historic importance for the immigration debate that now embroils the nation." -- Wow, that's a heroic assumption. I thought this was a NEWS paper not an editorial column. Moral defiance? Really? What's so moral about breaking our laws? What's so moral about refusing to make any effort to straighten it out? What's so moral about living here, using city services and paying a fraction or nothing at all for them? What's so moral about accessing our healthcare and not paying for it?

For the Catholic Church -- the Bishop and Fr Manship -- your moral outrage might carry a lot further with those who don't live in Fair Haven if either one of you had lifted a finger for medical treatment of rape victims this year, or child sexual abuse victims by priests any time in the last ten years. Where is your moral courage on these issues or is it only reserved for illegal immigrants who crash our borders and then ask us to change our laws and immigration policy to accomodate their illegal behavior. And by the way, your fight is in Washington. That's where they make the laws -- even Matos and DeStefano should know that.

Posted by: lisa | June 8, 2007 11:19 PM

Senator Dodd,

You were involved in many Immigraton Bills in the past thirty years in office. All have failed to stop people from entering this country Illegally.

Enforcement of our current laws should come before any bill giving Illegal aliens rights in America.
This is not a difficult concept. The border will be secure and then at this point we have no Illegals coming into this country illegally. Enforcement against the document fraud and Identity thefts along with Illegal employment in a fifteen year period of time, we could decrease the illegal population presently here perhaps by 50 percent. Ten million of the 20 million gone. We do not need to do a "round up". Let them make the casual mistake and allow law enforcement (local, state and federal) to do their jobs. Then perhaps in fifteen years we could stop to look at a bill similar to this one. It is not even logical to plow forward, complicate, inflame and prejudize the current voting public. Unless the intent is to import voters to abate our votes.
By the way, be like Kennedy and post your views on Amnesty. I was disapointed when I called your DC office to get info sent to me on your views and was told they could not talk about it and hung up! Is this the way to treat your voters? I am a Registered Democrat. I am contemplating putting this information on all my invoices. As I have in the Connecticut area, approximately thirty thousand customers. Some may buy $5.00 worth of product; but, I give them top consideration as if they had bought $50,000.00. I know I am only one vote; but, I feel that I deserve a personal apology for the rudeness of your staff. As any good administrator, you are only as good as the people below you. Remember this!
On June 14th, perhaps you would like to lend your support to the Connecticut base, American Warrior holding a meeting at Governor Rell's with the distinguished former Senator Rob Simmons. Your choice.

Posted by: Come On | June 9, 2007 10:05 AM

New Haven --
Starting off your comments by saying "It is sad to see anyone frightened with the threat of deporting" seems like meaningless drivel when you follow it up with a clear lack of concern for the real lives of these very same people.

These are families being ripped apart. Children (who are US citizens) are having their parents sent back to countries they have not lived in for decades. What is the value of that? Are you planning to raise these children who until now have not been on welfare or wards of the state?

I say leave these people alone. They are not hurting anyone in New Haven. Quite the contrary they are the reason that New Haven no longer has blocks of vacant properties and why there is a vibrant business district in Fair Haven that used to be boarded up shops.

Don't pretend to care. Simple human decency requires that big uniformed government thugs don't burst into homes, throw everyone on the floor, manhandle women and children and rip families apart. If you don't see that then maybe you should spend even more time thinking about yourself (and your values) and less time worrying about people who came here to feed their families.

If you had not been born here, would you act any differently than these immigrants? "There but for the grace of God go I."

Posted by: Bernard Bate | June 9, 2007 12:10 PM

Since the chilling ICE raids in New Haven earlier this week, a broad range of people have been reminded of Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous poem about popular apathy in the face of creeping totalitarianism in Nazi Germany:

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

One might debate the legality or illegality of the status of people, but recall that the holocaust was accomplished via assiduously legal means. As for me, I am proud to live in a city in which the Mayor, the Board of Aldermen, and the residents of have unequivocally declared all members of our community, documented or otherwise, as having the same rights to basic services as anyone else.

Posted by: Two2Three | June 9, 2007 3:35 PM

One of the folks interviewed points out that U.S. policies like NAFTA cause people to starve and thus force them to look for work in the U.S.

One of those arrested by ICE came from Nicaragua.

I don't know her personal story, but perhaps those who charge her with breaking the law can learn from the history of relations between the U.S. and Nicaragua.

Throughout the 20th century, the U.S. invaded and occupied Nicaragua many times. The U.S. installed and underwrote the regimes of various dictators, the last being Anastasio Somoza who was ousted by a popular revolution in 1979.

Frightened by the "threat of a good example" - namely a government that worked to provide literacy, healthcare, land and jobs to a mostly impoverished population - the Reagan administration hired a mercenary army, named "contras," and murdered peasants, demolished schools, health care centers and cooperatives and generally destroyed an economy that was thousands of times smaller than our own. In 1990 as a result of unending war and increasing poverty, that Nicaraguan government was voted out and replaced by successive ones approved by the U.S. authorities. But the result wasn't an improvement in economic conditions. To the contrary, Nicaragua's illiteracy soared, health conditions soured and jobs disappeared until most of Nicaragua's foreign currency now comes from remittances by immigrants who have been forced to flee their homeland and seek work in the U.S. and elsewhere in order to keep their families alive.

Is Nicaragua a special case? Hardly. In this hemisphere we can include Guatemala, El Salvador, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Venezuela, Chile - and more - on the list of sovereign countries whose people have been squeezed to the point of fleeing.

The other side of the immigrant "crisis" in New Haven and the United States is the multiple crises caused by one U.S. administration after another overthrowing democratically elected governments, assassinating leaders, invading with our military, and imposing brutal economic sanctions and blockades. For over a century.

What human is going to pay attention to crossing a political border when the alternative is starvation for your family, or political assassination, or imprisonment for protesting?

Let all those who express concern about immigrants violating U.S. laws first demand that the U.S. abide by its own laws and international treaties and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which our government signed 60 years ago.

You can treat polio with exercises - as was done with little success into the 1950's - or you can create a vaccine as did Salk and Sabin. The vaccine for the immigrant crisis is replacing the economic and physical violence waged by our government and its surrogates with policies of respect. Anything else is an exercise in ungliness and futility.

Posted by: CapColeman | June 10, 2007 10:55 AM

The remarks of "Come On" and Bernard Bate above employ convoluted logic. Every time a lawbreaker is incarcerated (for whatever offense, drug-dealing, financial swindles) there are children left behind by the imprisoned parent. Are you suggesting that we don't incarcerate anyone who has a kid that society may "have to raise"? I guess that means Scooter Libby should not go to prison because he has school age children. But liberals rarely employ their rhetoric and logic when it serves to favor someone on the "right". As to drawing an analogy to the Jews of Germany in the Nazi era, we have another false comparison. The Jews were citizens of their own country and had broken no laws. But again, liberals and left-wingers are famous for employing false analogies and base appeals to sympathy. For the Nazi analogy to hold water, you would have to equate the Nazi's Nuremberg laws (which deprived Jewish citizens of their civil rights) with the United States' Immigration and Naturalization laws which deprive individuals of the benefits of citizenship if they are not citizens and break into this country illegally in disregard of, and with disrespect for, its borders, its sovereignty and its laws, laws which, by the way, are the product of a representative democracy and reflect the will of whites, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and many others who make up the colorful and diverse fabric of this nation. So stop the phony rhetoric about Nazis and stop making the inane claim that illegal aliens have a right to social services unless you are prepared to fling open the borders, offer social services to "all" who come in here, and go broke for having done it.