Re: It is Jews' Duty to "protect immigration rights"

Heinrich wrote:
By Rachel Biale, Bay Area regional director of Progressive Jewish Alliance

But my parents, escaping the Nazis, were caught off the coast of Haifa by
the British and deported as illegal immigrants.

Well, they were *illegal immigrants*. They were trying to enter
Palestine illegally. They were trying to do to Palestine what the
Mexicans are trying to do to the United States. They were trying to
colonize it illegally, get enough Jews and armament into the country in
order to seize control of it. Anybody with the ability to read knows
about the Irgun and their offer to fight on the side of the Nazis in
order to establish a
Zionist state in Palestine.

As we remembered again at Passover,

What do you really understand about Passover?

Passover is a form of ritual cultural apartheid. The original purpose
of Passover was to keep young Hebrew men from taking part in the earth
worship rituals that took place every spring in Egypt. The priestesses
of the earth worship cult would have sex with all the men, and if there
were more men than the priestesses could service, the men would engage
in homosexual acts.

The Hebrew leaders wanted to keep their men from intermarrying with
gentiles, so they made them stay home for two weeks in the spring. The
custom was reinstituted when the Israelites passed into Canaan
to keep the Israelites from going into the groves of trees where the
earth worship ritual took place. God commanded Moses to cut down the
groves and destroy the altars of the Canaanites.

the Bible is quintessentially a tale of
migrations.

It's more like "wanderings". The ancient Habiru were nomads, wandering
from oasis to oasis in the desert. They were outcasts because of their
way of life. They weren't trusted by the people who lived in the cities
because they were "just passing through".

Our national identity is forged in "out of" and "into" experiences, from Abraham's immigration
to Canaan, and Jacob's sons' journey to Egypt, to the Exodus and re-immigration to the land
of Israel and the forced emigrations into exile.

It's not really clear whether the Hebrews were actual slaves in Egypt.
It's possible that their "bondage" was a mercenary contract to pharoah.
And, after various things took place in Egypt, pharoah let them go.

But, why did pharoah suddenly change his mind and chase them to the Red
Sea? It seemed that the Hebrews "despoiled" Egypt. They left Egypt with
all the gold and silver treasures they could lay their hands on through
theft or deceipt.

Out of the crucible of immigration comes one of the most powerful and often
repeated ethical teachings of the Torah: "You shall not oppress the
stranger. You should understand the heart of the stranger since you were
strangers in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 23:9).

Well, that's just old nomadic custom. The encampments at the oases were
truce zones. If different tribes fought over the wells at the oases,
their would be feuds and killings and well poisonings and everybody
would suffer.

And, when the Hebrews would camp in the desert, they were obligated by
nomadic custom to give
humanitarian aid to "sojourners", who were also nomads or exiles or
fugitives wandering in the desert.

Then the "sojourners" were expected to move on, they weren't expected
to stay and compete with the nomads for scarce resources in the desert.
Nomadic hospitality required humanitarian aid, not assimilation.

The Mexicans aren't invading the USA looking for humanitarian aid. They
aren't desperate refugees fleeing starvation, they just want to make
money so they can send it back to Mexico. If they send half their pay
back to Mexico, their families can live very well on that smaller
economy where housing costs less.

But, back to Exodus:

Moses' father-in-law, Jethro was high priest of the Midianites, and
Jethro gave Moses his daughter as a wife. The Midianites basically
adopted Moses into their tribe.

The Midianites were nomads too. They had also been known as the Hyksos,
who had once conquered Egypt, but had left and wandered in the desert
as nomads called "Sashans" by the Egyptians.

There is a stele in Thebes which has an inscription about "Jah, god of
the Sashans". "Yah" was a generic god, though, it wasn't the real name
of the Sashan's Babylonian god. Jethro probably told Moses
that it was Sama, the Babylonian sun god. We sometimes see "SamaEL"
instead, that's "Sama" plus
"EL". "EL" is also a generic term for god. The Israelites probably knew
very well what name of the
god in the burning bush was, and the scribes later record that the bush
god said. "I am that I am",
And that's basically what "Yah" means: "I AM."

In addressing the current immigration-related swelling of public protest and
Washington partisanship, we must begin with this empathy for the stranger
and oppose any legislation that will criminalize immigrants and the citizens
who give them basic humanitarian aid.

The Mexicans want far more than basic humanitarian aid. The political
agenda of the Mexicans is to outbreed and colonize the United States
with as many people as possible, in order to gain political control and
perhaps regain some of the territory ceded by Mexico in the 1848 Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The United States paid Mexico the equivalent of
$1.5 trillion USD for the territories in the Mexican Cession and Mexico
offered to cede Baja California and most of northern Mexico. At that
time, half the Mexican politicians didn't want Mexico to develop those
territories, they wanted to be a much smaller country centering around
the old colonial Mexico.

The Sensenbrenner Bill (HR 4437) would do just that, along with many other
provisions that threaten to turn our country into a monstrous police state.

Oh, like Germany, that deported millions of illegal aliens in the
1930's and 1940's? Germany had an illegal alien problem. Jews and
Gypsies and Slavs were illegally entering Germany and taking jobs away
from Germans whose families had done that kind of work for centuries.
Jews were supporters of international socialism and tried to overthrow
the German government in 1922.

Germany carefully crafted its laws to deport all the illegal aliens and
rid itself of the international socialist challenge to its nation.

America succeeded for 230 years because its citizens came from the
Anglo Saxon and German cultures, where laws were respected. In the 17th
and 18th centuries, a thief could be hanged or transported to a penal
colony for stealing a loaf of bread. The European system of justice
didn't mess around with criminals, it punished them.

How else can we envision deporting more than 11 million people, most of whom
came to this country for the very reasons we and our ancestors did: to build
a better life for our children?

I can easily envision such a deportation of illegal aliens. Right now
there are 40 million illegal alien Mexicans in America, not just 11
million. The first waves of illegal alien Mexicans came in 1915 during
the Pancho Villa revolution in Mexico. Those illegal aliens never tried
to become citizens unless they were caught. Some of them crossed and
recrossed the border, multiple times, taking abducted girls back to
Mexico, or abducting girls in Mexico to be their wives.

There are three or four generations of illegal alien Mexicans in the
USA. If the current 12 to 15 million illegal aliens are granted
amnesty, they will want to bring their parents and their wife and
children, and soon there will be 80 million more Mexicans living in the
USA. 30% of the population will be Mexican and they will be too
powerful a political force for the Americans to resist at the polls.

Americans will have to treat the Mexicans just like the Jews treated
the Palestinians, with armed force,
if the United States of America is to survive.

The proposals to criminalize, pursue and prosecute illegal immigrants go
hand-in-hand with the Real ID Act passed by Congress last May, a measure
little known to the general public. This law requires all states to
electronically encode personal identification information in all driver
licenses. It will make the driver license a mandatory national ID card that
will become a tool in scanning the population for "unwanteds," illegal
immigrants first and foremost (more information is available on this at the
ACLU's site: www.realnightmare.org).

The problem with this "Real ID" is that there are 40 million loophole
Mexicans already in the USA.
The 14th amendment to the US constitution gave citizenship to freed
African slaves, *and nobody else*!

The American Indians had to wait until 1924 to become citizens. The
14th amendment was never intended to make the children of illegal
aliens into citizens. But, as it stands now, the government will accept
a birth certificate that shows the person was born in the USA and give
them a social security card. With that, they can get a driver's license
and they can work in the USA even though they aren't actually citizens.

As for economic justice, the issue is complex. In the long run, illegal
immigrant workers promote economic growth, though in the short term they
might place a burden on social, medical and educational services. Over time,
they infuse the labor force with a larger pool of younger workers and, given
their larger families, enlarge the size of the next generation. Many also
pay into the Social Security system but never collect benefits.

Many of the older illegal immigrants are collecting social security,
even though they aren't citizens.


This economic growth comes, however, at a price that is often neglected: low
wages that depress incomes throughout the low-wage labor market. Immigrant
labor, legal and illegal, must be seen in the context of globalization and
outsourcing. We generally ship raw materials and machinery for industrial
production to countries where labor is cheap. When we can't - in
agriculture, construction, food services, tending our gardens and raising
our kids - we reverse the direction and bring cheap labor here instead of
sending the work abroad.

America has an entire class of people sitting idle, wishing they had
jobs. The African slaves who were freed weren't really ready for
citizenship and the responsibility of the vote when it was given them
in 1866.
The resulting lack of understanding of political issues led to turmoil
and interracial squabbles in the South for ten years. Finally, the
government withdrew occupying Federal troops from the South, and locals
suppressed the voting rights of the Africans for 90 years in order to
maintain control of their own states. The Africans tended to migrate to
Northern states, looking for jobs in industry. They often lacked the
skills for those jobs, but they were displaced from the South and
didn't want to return to a place where they had no civil rights.

These Africans who are hanging around on street corners and
congregating in liquor store parking lots could be retrained for
agricultural jobs and housed in empty apartment buildings and private
houses seized by the government when the illegal alien Mexicans are
rounded up and deported.

Thus, should a "guest worker" provision be included in immigration reform
(problematic in its own right as it would create a vulnerable underclass),
these workers cannot be left solely dependent on their employers (as is the
case in the Kennedy-McCain Bill). The program must include provisions for
workers' protection through legislation, oversight bodies, and the right to
organize.

No matter what is done, there is going to be a vulnerable underclass,
whether it's African or poor Whites.
This divisive issue pits the Mexicans against the Africans and the
Whites and favors avaracious employers who seek to maximize profits
from exploitation of the poorest people.


As we debate the complex issue of immigration, we must remember the
commandment to "understand the heart of the stranger."

The 3500 year old commandments have little to do with the illegal
immigrant Mexican. It doesn't matter what his motivation was for
violating the immigration laws, he must be deported or he must agree to
leave voluntarily when he appears in court. The problem with the INS's
"catch and release" arrests, is that the alien is allowed to promise to
appear in court, and they usually don't come in.

As we debate the complex issue of immigration, we must not be deceived
by the customs of nomads who lived 3500 years ago. We must not try to
apply ancient Mosaic Law, or even Talmudic interpretations of Torah
when looking at totally different issues.

While Jews may feel that they must take part in the current political
life of their host country, and it is in fact the privilege of every
citizen to take part in American politics, they must understand the
*real* issues under debate.

And, while Jews may believe that they have a responsibilty to "repair
the world", it's actually not broken.
The problem is that elected American officials are not enforcing
existing laws. America does not need immigration reform, it needs
strict enforcement.

I was just watching a program about an illegal alien who was afraid to
drive her car because she might get stopped and didn't have a license.
She kept driving anyway. She was caught and sent to jail and she had to
pay a $600 USD fine, but she kept driving. She wanted to bring her two
children into the USA, so she paid a smuggler $6000 USD to try to bring
them in with false documents. They were caught at the border and sent
back to Mexico. Two months later, she spent another $6000 USD to
smuggle her children over the border. This time they made it and the
illegal alien family was happily re-united. But, they were caught and
went to court and agreed to leave the USA voluntarily.

In her attempt to live in America illegally, she spent at least $12,600
USD. There are many Americans living in poverty on less than $12,000
USD a year, but this illegal alien was living in a nice house and
driving a nice car, and I wondered how it was that an illegal alien
criminal like that could do better than an American who was born here
and has the right to work and prosper.

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