Sunday, April 25, 2010

Immigration Protests in Arizona

Brief TV footage of some of protests in Phoenix regarding the new immigration law there. A cop gets hit in the head with a water bottle while escorting an idiot with a flag tied around his head. Really not a good idea to throw stuff at a cop. If you're a young person and get charged with a felony your life is pretty much ruined. No financial aid, for one thing. And the national database of arrests is becoming more complete, which means you'll probably be barred from any sort of teaching or public sector job as well.

Protests of this sort, including student walkouts of high schools, have been extremely rare in this area of the country. But the law is draconian, and a lot of people are going to react against that: "It's going to change our lives," said (a 13-year-old American citizen) from Phoenix. "We can't walk to school any more. We can't be in the streets anymore without the pigs thinking we're illegal immigrants."

Phoenix is one of the worst hit areas in the country when it comes to the housing meltdown and foreclosure crisis.
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The folks who I've heard in day-to-day life blast illegal immigration the most, are legal immigrants. This may be a case of differentiation - i.e. 'see, I'm not like them'. I remember that almost none of the Chinese-managed stores in the Mission and other San Francisco neighborhoods shut during the Bush-era immigration protests, while almost all the Mexican and Central American-managed ones did.

The scope of 'immigrant rights' is pretty wide, most wealthy business people favor a form of immigrant rights; the reason to oppose these specific laws in Arizona is because they are an attack on working people.

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