For starters, you get an entirely different view of the issues on immigration is you pick up media aimed at the Indian immigrants. The May 2007 edition of India Currents gives us a Point / Counterpoint discussion on the question: Is loosening up of numerical limits desirable? Captions tell the story:
The H-1B cap is not preserving the wages of U.S. employees; rather, the jobs are being permanently moved to India!
- and -
According to a Duke University study, immigrants founded 25 percent of the engineering an technology companies created in the last 10 years.
Next, since the new reformed immigration package would greatly expand the number of "guest workers" allowed to enter the United States, there is very real need to address the abusive practices of labor contractors. The United Farm Workers, obviously, sees the Union as the appropriate tool to do this. This morning, they emailed me a copy of their labor contractor action page. Unless this is solved, we have only moved the issue of human rights to a different context, we have not solved it.
In California politics, immigration is a big issue and often for the wrong (repressive) reasons. Orange County Representative Dana Rohrabacher has already been quoted (Costa Mesa Daily Pilot) as seeing the bill feeding an anti-Democratic backlash in the next election.
The battle over immigration is far from over and Greens need to be able to articulate a clear position, based firmly on the 10 key values of this party. Everyone who might think about spending time in any tabling or voter registration efforts should make sure that they understand the recent reform bill and to be able to discuss this bill in light of the current platform.
