Tag Archives: immigration

If You Can’t Say Something Nice…….

I’ve got to say, events of these last few months have really put a strain on my mother’s admonition that “If you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all.”

Okay–let me try. The Indiana legislature did take a (hesitant) step toward rational policy-making by setting up a committee to study marijuana prohibition. It’s only a study committee, but it is implicit recognition of the fact that our drug war policies are costly and counterproductive. That’s a good thing.

Problem is, so far as I can tell, it’s the only good thing that has happened during this legislative session.

  • At a time when poll after poll finds job creation at the top of the list of voter concerns, the GOP majority has been fixated on restricting abortion,  prohibiting   same-sex marriage, union-busting and immigrant bashing.
  • Despite all the verbal hand-wringing about the state’s fiscal problems, the legislature refused once again to eliminate Indiana’s 1008 wasteful, unnecessary and expensive Townships.
  • The war on public education may be well-intentioned (to give lawmakers the benefit of the doubt), but it is anything but informed. One small example: the effort to link teacher pay to student achievement. Sounds reasonable–if you don’t understand the situation.  The likely result would be to discourage good teachers from teaching in schools with lots of poor kids, since available research links student performance to parental income. (There are ways of measuring achievement that control for socio-economic status, but somehow I don’t think that’s what our genius legislators intend.)

    I have a student who is interning at the State Senate. His account of the “discourse” (note quotes) in that august chamber are dispiriting, to say the least. To date, my favorite is the statement made by Senator Ron Alting during discussion of Delph’s anti-immigration bill. Alting began by saying that the legislation would damage Indiana’s reputation; he also recognized that it would hurt economic development and our convention business, saying “we will be impacted like Arizona.” His conclusion? “So be it. I’ll vote for it.”

    Just kill me now.

    Proof of Citizenship

    Well, I see that our embarrassing legislators have given committee approval to the “let’s target brown folks” bill–aka “immigration enforcement.”  Much like the widely criticized Arizona law after which it was modeled, the measure would allow police to stop people and demand proof that they are in the country legally if there is “probable cause” to question their immigration status. “Probable cause” includes failure to speak English, a provision that led a snarky friend of mine to suggest that people in southern Indiana should start carrying their birth certificates.

    How would you prove that you are a citizen, or otherwise legally entitled to be in the United States, if you were stopped? Those of us with passports could start carrying them everywhere, I suppose. Or we could carry birth certificates. A driver’s license isn’t considered proof.

    Since the sponsors of this bill insist it does not depend on profiling or skin color, we would all need to carry “official papers” of some sort in case we were stopped. And that is ironic, although I’m sure it is an irony that escapes our intrepid lawmakers.

    When my oldest grandson was twelve or thirteen, my husband took him to New York’s Ellis Island. The museum of immigration had a wonderful interactive display, showcasing the history of those who came to America and the reasons they left their homelands. What made the deepest impression on our grandson was the number of people who left their original homes because they were required to have “papers” on them at all times, required to prove their right to walk the streets of the cities in which they lived. He found such a requirement incomprehensible.

    I hope he has his papers. He tans easily.

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    Downside of Democracy

    Many years ago, during a discussion with a friend whose husband served in the Indiana House, she said something I’ve always remembered: “The problem with representative democracy is that it is representative.”

    This session of the Indiana Legislature seems intent on proving the point.

    If you’ve been following national news, you may be thinking that those we elected to the General Assembly couldn’t possibly be as crazy as, for example, the South Dakota lawmaker who sponsored a bill that would have made it legal to shoot abortion doctors (he withdrew it in the wake of the publicity), or the Arizona legislator who responded to the horrific shootings in Tucson by sponsoring a bill to allow concealed guns to be carried anywhere, or the Wisconsin Governor who is threatening to call out the National Guard if public workers protest his efforts to strip them of bargaining rights they’ve had since the 1950s.

    But you’d be wrong.

    Think an anti-bullying bill should be a slam-dunk? Think again. The Senate Committee killed it on a 3-5 vote. Opponents expressed an uncharacteristic concern for the First Amendment rights of schoolchildren…especially their right to express anti-gay sentiments.

    Speaking of child safety, surely a bill to require all child care providers to meet health and safety requirements—staff criminal history checks, fire safety, drug testing and the like—should be a no-brainer? Wrong! Advance America’s Eric Miller brought in God’s folks to testify that the bill gave government “too much authority over Church ministries,” and the bill died without a committee vote.

    Wisconsin isn’t the only state trying to strip public employees of bargaining rights—here in Indiana, a bill to abolish Indiana’s merit system has emerged from committee. And Mike Delph’s effort to have Indiana emulate Arizona by targeting people who “look like” they might be illegal immigrants is moving along nicely (never mind that Arizona’s convention bookings declined 36% in the wake of that state’s law, and never mind that immigration is an exclusively federal responsibility).

    And of course, our “representative representatives” aren’t content with defeating the anti-bullying bill, and reviving the bill to amend the Indiana Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Taking their war against gay Hoosiers up a notch, there’s an upcoming committee vote on a bill to prohibit state universities from providing domestic partner benefits.

    The haters and the crazies are well represented in the Indiana General Assembly. The rest of us, not so much.

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    Kicking the Dog

    Watching the Indiana legislature reminds me more than anything of those days—and we’ve all had them—when nothing has gone right at the office, we’ve made fools of ourselves in a meeting, and we’re just in a foul mood. So we go home and yell at our spouse, snap at our children and kick the dog.

    Our lawmakers are faced with massive problems, not all of which they created themselves. We have horrendous budgetary and fiscal problems, fights over education policy are reaching the boiling point, the Chief Justice and the Governor have stressed the need to rethink incarceration policies, and notwithstanding the constant hype from state officials, Indiana’s job creation has been anemic (to put it mildly).

    So our legislators are kicking the dog—in this case, gays and immigrants.

    Not that Indiana’s legislature has ever distinguished itself in the “serious and responsible” category. (When the late Harrison Ullmann edited NUVO, he regularly referred to the General Assembly as The World’s Worst Legislature.)  But this focus on gays and immigrants (more accurately, brown immigrants) is not only wrongheaded, it’s counterproductive. As the CEO of Cummins, Inc. wrote in this morning’s Indianapolis Star, Cummins has been a bright spot for employment in Indiana, creating jobs at a time when many employers have been cutting back. But much of their growth has depended upon international trade, and immigrant-bashing will hinder further job creation.

    “We plan to add even more people given our ambitious plans for growth. These new jobs could be located in many places in the world; for us to add them in Indiana we must have an environment that is welcoming to all people and where diversity is valued and allowed to flourish.”

    I hope some of our legislators are listening, but I doubt it. Kicking the dog doesn’t solve any of our problems, but it evidently makes them feel better.

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    How Small and Ugly Can We Get?

    I received this email from a colleague with whom I team-teach classes from time to time. It speaks for itself.

    “One of my IUPUI journalism students was enjoying coffee at a Greenwood, Indiana Starbucks while chatting with his friend José. They were speaking Spanish. A woman interrupted them saying, “You need to start speaking ‘American’ or go back to the hole in Mexico you came from.” My student laughed at her, an admirable response when confronted with blatant racism.

    Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident for my student.  Carmel and Fishers police have stopped my student for DWB–driving with brown skin. Racial profiling is alive and well in Indiana. Indiana has a racist heritage that will take many more generations to be eradicated if, indeed, it will ever be eradicated. My only hope is the woman in this incident has no children to whom she can pass along her hatred of others.

    At one time the Klan flourished in Indiana. Hangings were social events followed by pictures of the hangings being sent as post cards to friends. Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and many others of their ilk spout their opinions in inflammatory language. Sarah Palin knows who the “true” Americans are, according to her. Unfortunately, a climate of hate speech and lack of civility feeds the courage of those, like the Starbucks woman, who are prone to racism. She apparently speaks “American,” a language that I am not familiar with. My student is a winner of a highly competitive college scholarship who speaks three languages, including English, fluently. The woman who accosted him is fluent only in hate.”

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