Kinder, gentler immigration reform

The American Citizens of Fox Valley Citizens for Peace & Justice supports comprehensive immigration reform and call upon Congressman Bill Foster, Sen. Dick Durbin and Sen. Roland Burris to enact such legislation in 2010. We would, however, like to see legislation which is free from the punitive measures in the bills currently proposed.

Increased militarization of our border, raids, detentions and deportations make our whole culture and society hostile, paranoid and brutal. Electronic surveillance and biometric identity cards would cause the loss of privacy for citizens, legal residents and recent immigrants alike.

So called "guest worker" programs would keep pay extremely low for immigrants and set conditions that allow employers to intimidate and manipulate workers.

Such programs also keep the wage floor low for everybody. Requiring undocumented people to pay fines and other such requirements punish people who have already been punished.

Most undocumented people are victims of corporate economic globalization, as formalized in trade treaties such as NAFTA, which has created borders which are wide open for the free exchange of currency and products, but closed to the free passage of workers. Also, some undocumented people among us are victims of a decades-old U.S. foreign policy which has materially supported regimes which cruelly oppressed their own poor.

These conditions are optimal for corporations and large investors, but are harmful for working people on both sides of those borders. They turn undocumented workers into an oppressed, hated and scapegoated group.

Powerful elected officials and talking heads blame those people for our ills, and distract us from their own abuses of power.

Mary Shesgreen

Elgin