Filming Against Odds: Undocumented Youth “Come Out” With Their Dreams
By Anne Galisky, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine.
“Papers”is the story of undocumented youth and the challenges they face as they turn 18 without legal status. More than two million undocumented children live in the U.S. today, most with no path to obtain citizenship. These are youth who were born outside the U.S. and yet know only the U.S. as home. The film highlights five undocumented youth who are “American” in every sense but their legal paperwork.
...read moreBronze Bikinis for Beneficence
Well, Labor Day weekend is coming up, and if you live in Atlanta and don’t have room to fart in Midtown with the addition of 40,000 tourists dressed like stormtroopers, you know what that means: DragonCon. And if you’ve ever been one of those 40,000 tourists, pressed tit-to-bare-back with a chick in a bronze bikini [...]
...read moreThere Are No Perfect Accusers.
The big story in the news today is the release on Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the sexual assault case against him teeters. The New York Times features a breathtakingly victim-blamey article about the accuser’s credibility, detailing the ways in which she is not a perfect human being: The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on [...]
...read moreMy Life as an Undocumented Immigrant
A must-read this morning. I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it. I’ve tried. Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high [...]
...read moreJayaben Desai, 1933-2010
Jayaben Desai has died at 77 years of age. From The Hindu: The diminutive India-born Ms. Desai, who moved to Britain from Tanzania in 1969, came to be known as a “lioness” for her role in leading the two-year long strike at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories, north London, in the 1970s to demand union [...]
...read moreTaking Babies from Undocumented Immigrants
Encarnación Romero was an undocumented immigrant working at a poultry plant in Missouri when she was arrested in 2007 during a raid by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She was jailed for two years for federal identity theft, because she used a fake name and Social Security number when applying for her job (those charges, [...]
...read moreYes, I’m sure immigrants are crossing the desert by foot for the free water
I can’t believe that this is even a dispute, or that there are people who seriously think it should be illegal to leave jugs of water out for desperate immigrants walking across the Arizona desert. Two years ago, Daniel J. Millis was ticketed for littering after he was caught by a federal Fish and Wildlife [...]
...read moreOne of my favourite bits of cognitive dissonance
There’s something that always gets me about white people who want to restrict immigration so as to preserve their cultural and racial dominance, which is supposedly under threat, in a given country. Who want to ban, for instance, Muslim women from wearing clothing of religious, cultural and social importance because they feel uncomfortable encountering the [...]
...read moreWeapons Scientists and Surgically Altered Actresses
You’d think they had nothing in common, right? You’d be wrong about that. But perhaps the only way to discover the connection is, as I did, to become an American citizen. Dressed appropriately, the Wizard, a couple of friends and I shot off to an older, but nicely renovated small town theater to be naturalized [...]
...read moreblack girls like us
look. i am not abusive to my kid. not even close. and neither is her father. she is a happy, healthy three year old. she speaks three languages, loves to dance middle eastern style, and explains to strangers that ‘mama is from america’ but she is from bumblebee (the name of her preschool). but, us [...]
...read moreOutlaw Clothing: Burqas, Islamophobia and Women’s Rights
The ongoing quest of the French government to preserve their country’s “secular traditions” came to the fore once again Tuesday when the lower house of France’s parliament voted to ban women from wearing any face-covering veil, such as the infamous burqa or the less “extreme” niqab — a move obviously targeting French Muslim women, of [...]
...read moreStop right there, thank you very much
Two new fronts on the immigration fight in the US: In Nebraska, a small town called Fremont just passed a referendum today that will require tenants who are not US citizens to get an “occupancy license” from the city council in order to rent housing. Even residents of nursing homes will be required to get [...]
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