Tacoma, Immigration and the Northwest Detention Center: A Call to Action for Tacomans

I was perusing the zinelibrary.info site and to my surprise found a zine just posted today about Tacoma's Northwest Detention Center.

http://zinelibrary.info/tacoma-immigration-and-northwest-detention-center-call-action-tacomans

The zine is a compilation of several articles about the raids, Homeland Security's involvement with the various detention projects, and the civil rights issues at stake.

Police State Police State Police State

From the NYTimes:

In the first counterterrorism strategy of its kind in the nation, roving teams of New York City police officers armed with automatic rifles and accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs will patrol the city’s subway system daily...

New York City might be the most heavily-patrolled police city in the United States. Officers with high-powered rifles and MP5s already patrol above-ground sites like the Empire State Building and the National Guard patrols NYC and New Jersey train systems with heavily-powered weapons. The article notes that police will patrol the subways in 12 hours shifts starting next month.

Not since World War Two's massive internments have we seen local police forces teaming up with ICE raids and Homeland Security as much as we have seen in the last five years. The 404-6 marginal acceptance of bills like HR 1955 and ideologically-based violence against protesters point in a dismal direction. The U.S. military's development and use of civilian control technologies like Active Denial Systems and other directed-energy weapons make the government's control (ideological and physical) very possible and real. I recall last weekend at the West Coast Journalism Conference in L.A. Salvadoran journalist Roberto Lovato saying, "I've never seen the United States look so much like El Salvador in my life!"

Smash I.C.E.

According to Operation End Game, the plan is to remove all undocumented migrants by 2012. Here is what an ACLU op-ed said about the plan:

There is no way to expel 12 million people without terrorizing and compromising the civil liberties of anyone who "looks foreign." Even US citizens, as well as immigrants who are here legally, will live with the fear of arrest.

ICE tactics call to mind sinister human rights abuses from other parts of the world. The United States went to war to stop Slobodan Milosevic's attempt to "ethnically cleanse" Kosovo in 1999. We should ask ourselves how, just eight years later, we came to be carrying out a policy that involves such similar tactics -- lightning raids, mass arrests, packed detention centers, and mass deportations.

As part of the operation, the largest GEO Group detention facility on the West Coast is located in Tacoma, WA. The video features a protest in Tacoma that was heavily policed.

The New Economics of Labor Migration

The "new economics of labor migration" has added explanatory power to the neo-classical model by focusing on a household’s decision to send migrants in a context where migration serves to mitigate the impact of insurance and market imperfections on "emitting" households. The realization of this idea can be traced back to Stark and Bloom's 1985 paper.

The old Harris-Todaro model of migration is the traditional, and more individualized, model of migration. Contemporary research on the determinants of migration, however, has focused on the importance of economic and noneconomic factors in the decision to migrate in a "dualistic" economy, that is, one in which there rigid wages in the urban sector and flexible wages in the rural sector.

This “cumulative causation” of migration provides a framework for understanding migration by looking at individuals and households.

In the individual model model of migration, wage flexibility in rural areas effects decisions to migrate from rural to urban areas, where rigid wages are often higher. Urban utility may be higher due to unionization, proximity to policymakers, and thus more likely to have minimum wages, unemployment benefits, day cares, and pension schemes. And employers will often pay higher wages to "buy the threat" from loss of productivity caused by competing low-wage employment. According to the Harris-Todaro Model, an equilibrium obtains when the expected urban wage is equal to the marginal product of a rural worker.

Household models of migration, on the other hand, consider several noneconomic factors that influence the decision to migrate. Migration networks, for example, serve as a means of conveying information from those with migration experience to potential migrants, and network members assist new migrants, and therefore networks serve to influence the expected income gains from, and the uncertainty associated with, migration. There is also a distinction to be made between community and family networks. Family networks are considered "strong ties" and community networks "weak ties" for various reasons.

The household model therefore adds sophisticated variables like information, insurance, and social capital to the model. This is more difficult for the neo-classical model to absorb, however. It doesn't mean it cannot be done. Presumably everything can be reduced to mathematical formalisms, right? Perhaps, but models do have obvious limitations. Even the household model has its own. It opens the door to various other migration factors, such gender and totalitarian biases in the household itself, and the dynamics of labor- and wealth-endowments of households.

The Internet is a network:

Dia de los Muertos

A video project I worked on at the Tacoma Art Museum.

Who Is A German?

Germany is one of the few countries in the world that still primarily bases its citizenship on "blood". It harks back to a law passed in 1913 during the Imperial Period. The application of this law spurs many irregularities. For example, immigrants from Romania, Poland or the Russian Federation who cannot speak a word of German, who've never seen Germany, and who are completely un-German culturally, can arrive in Deutschland and automatically lay claim to citizenship because their ancestral forbears emigrated from a German province some centuries earlier. On the other hand a Turk, Croat, or Italian, born and raised in Germany, who speaks fluent German, and who has never seen his ancestor's homeland, is not quite a full German citizen. They have a limited dual-citizenship that requires them to choose one allegiance and renounce the other before their 23rd birthday.