Reforming Immigration: Build Bridges, not Walls

“We should be building bridges instead of walls.”

Tim Flanagan

While 35% of the 59 million immigrants in the past 50 years have come from Mexico, South and Central American immigrant populations are now booming in the U.S.

http://time.com/4050914/1965-immigration-act-pew/

The negative associations many have with the word immigration might have changed in the last few months, after since the the survey portion of the report was completed in March and April of this year, before a summer that brought immigration to the forefront of political conversation—from Donald Trump’s comment that Mexican immigrants are “rapists,” Europe’s migrants crisis, and the Pope’s declaration on his American visit that he was the “son of immigrants.”

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“Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you
and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”

― Franklin D. Roosevelt

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“Like other discriminatory legislation in our country’s history, immigration laws avivachomsky define and differentiate legal status on the basis of arbitrary attributes. Immigration laws create unequal rights. People who break immigration laws don’t cause harm or even potential harm (unlike, for example, drunk driving, which creates the potential for harm even if no accident occurs). Rather, people who break immigration laws do things that are perfectly legal for others, but denied to them–like crossing a border or, even more commonly, simply exist.”
― Aviva Chomsky,
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kucinich
“I take issue with many people’s description of people being “Illegal” Immigrants. There aren’t any illegal Human Beings as far as I’m concerned.”
― Dennis Kucinich

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WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—”As America’s bridges, roads, and other infrastructure dangerously deteriorate from decades of neglect, there is a mounting sense of urgency that it is time to build a giant wall.

Across the U.S., whose rail system is a rickety antique plagued by deadly accidents, Americans are increasingly recognizing that building a wall with Mexico, and possibly another one with Canada, should be the country’s top priority.”

…While some think that America’s declining infrastructure is a national-security threat, Dorrinson strongly disagrees. “If immigrants somehow get over the wall, the condition of our bridges and roads will keep them from getting very far,” he said.

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“Unless US citizens acknowledge and understand their country’s imperial past, they will not be able to understand its present or future. Much of the recent and current Hispanic resettlement of parts of the United States is a consequence of empire…. Counter-colonization follows colonization, and the waves of migrants always flow back like returning tides.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto
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“The immigration debate has become mired in myths, falsehoods and half-truths, with little clarity among liberals or conservatives alike. Conservatives think there’s nothing wrong with Trump defending America to keep “the bad ones” out anis

because, after all, every sovereign nation should have that right. Liberals concede the point, but modify it a bit by claiming exception for the “good ones,” such as the Dreamers (those who were “brought” here at a young age “due to no fault of their own”). Immigrants’ rights advocates seek an elusive middle ground, even as the terrain of immigration has shifted from morality or economics or even national identity to the spectacle of crime and punishment.”

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/15/everyones-wrong-on-immigration-open-borders-are-the-only-way-to-defeat-trump-and-build-a-better-world/

This entire debate is built on cruel and false assumptions. Here’s the truth:
Immigrants’ rights are human rights

ANIS SHIVANI
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“To paraphrase Rousseau, man is born free, yet everywhere he is caged. Barbed-wire, concrete walls, and gun-toting guards confine people to the nation-state of their birth. But why? The argument for open borders is both economic and moral. All people should be free to move about the earth, uncaged by the arbitrary lines known as borders.”

Alex Tabarrok

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/get-rid-borders-completely/409501/

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