Women...Despised and Persecuted Ideas

[Madspirit]

http://www.now.org/news/note/053007.html

Despised and Persecuted Ideas

Below the Belt: A Biweekly Column by NOW President Kim Gandy

May 30, 2007

Try to put yourself in this picture: Imagine you are a woman with two children, and you live in perpetual fear. Your husband hits you frequently, and threatens to put you on the street if you ask for money to buy groceries or clothes for the kids. As primary caregiver to your kids, and due to lack of money and other resources, going to school is not an option.

You used to work part time at a factory where you were harassed by your bosses, who often denied your full wages. You would have protested, but knew there would be nothing to protect you from being fired if you did so. You were fired anyway, once you became pregnant with your third child.

You have no access to contraceptives, nor can you afford pre- or post-natal care. Your husband beat you for getting fired. You want to call the police, but you are afraid that they will arrest you, or take your kids away. So you have no recourse, and no way out.

If this were your life, where would you guess you lived? Some poverty-ridden country with a corrupt government?

Maybe. But you could very well be a woman right here in the U.S Like nearly half of all undocumented immigrants, you may have entered the U.S. legally, but your visa expired — or you came here as a "dependent spouse," and your husband overstayed his work permit. Without funds of your own (if you came on a "spouse visa," it didn't allow you to work anyway) then you have no way to return to a home thousands of miles away. And anyway you don't want to take your children, who are U.S. citizens, away from everything and everyone they know. You feel trapped.


In all of the debate about immigration laws and what is needed, there is little recognition that, right here in the good ole' U.S. of A., there are entire communities of people living without basic human rights, in circumstances not so different from those you might imagine in faraway countries with repressive regimes.

We don't like to think of our country that way, but terrible abuses are happening right under our noses, some of it by government officials, and it's high time to take a hard look at this cruel system, and make some long-needed reforms. That's why NOW was a founding partner of the National Coalition on Immigrant Women's Rights (NCIWR), and we are working to bring attention to the problems faced by immigrant women (including the one-fourth of immigrants who are undocumented) and to fight for specific reforms that address issues like domestic violence, child abuse, and sex trafficking.

Immigration is a highly politicized issue, but this is a nation of immigrants from all over the world (not just Latin America) and it's fair to ask whether we would have wanted our grandmothers and great-grandmothers to be treated that way.

And I can't help noticing that many of the loudest and nastiest voices — those generating the most heat and the least light — are the same ones who also oppose women's rights, civil right and reproductive rights at every opportunity. Some legislators have even gone so far as to suggest that restrictions on abortion would serve to provide more future U.S.-born workers, thereby limiting the need for immigration. Whose bodies are on line now?

Not surprisingly, misinformation about immigrants and immigration (and nearly every other subject) is rampant on right-wing talk media. Even among people who consider themselves progressive, I've heard some pretty misinformed views — ones that could have come right from the mouth of Rush Limbaugh. For example, it seems to be a common belief that nearly all undocumented immigrants "climbed the fence" or "sneaked across the border," though that is far from the truth. Why do we think that? Because the name-callers on talk radio and rant-TV say so, and too many people don't question their inflammatory rhetoric.

And their hate-talk seems to have been translated into public action, in everything from targeted deportation of pregnant women, to frightening raids of the homes of legal immigrants, to factory roundups in which frightened children are separated from their distraught mothers for days and weeks. NOW Executive Vice President Olga Vives was part of a Children's Hearing on the impact of these raids, sponsored by Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM). Their stories are heartbreaking.

Last month the New York Times reported that a woman's home had been raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials looking for the husband she'd divorced in 2003. Armed officials pushed past her 12-year-old daughter into the woman's bedroom, where she and her four-year old son were sleeping. They pulled off the covers, adding indignity to the terror of the raid. On their way out, the men told the girl "they might come back," compounding her fear. Commenting on this raid, the local ICE director of deportation and removal said, "We would like to find fugitive aliens at 100 percent of the locations we go to, but it's not an exact science."

At an ICE raid in March at a plant producing goods under government contract in New Bedford, MA, 361 undocumented workers were arrested, the majority of them women from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, Cape Verde, and Portugal. These women were shipped to prisons in Texas and New Mexico, leaving over one hundred children behind in New Bedford, stranded and frightened. ICE pressured the town division of socials services to place the children in foster homes.

On any given day, ICE reportedly holds about 26,000 people in detention, including "detaining" entire families in former prisons, and there is no centralized system through which their families can learn where their relatives have been sent.

How can anyone stand by while women across this country are experiencing wholesale deprivations of their economic, reproductive, political and human rights, not to mention basic freedoms? With all the hate speech out there, some are even embarrassed to defend the rights of those who have come here looking for a better life.

In that vein, I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to
Preserve their reputation and social standing
Never can bring about a reform.
Those who are truly in earnest must be willing to be
Anything, or nothing, in the world's estimation, and
Publicly and privately, in season and out,
Avow their sympathies with
Despised and persecuted ideas, and their advocates,
And bear the consequences."

It was over 100 years ago that Susan B. Anthony said those words. She was talking about that most "despised and persecuted" idea of women having the right to vote, but it applies equally to the controversial issues of today.

We should take a page from her book.

Learn more about NOW's work on immigrant women's rights, and read NOW's prinicples for immigration reform.

[shance]

1. Thank you for posting Madspirit. Great stuff.

n/t

[Madspirit]

2. kick