The Gesture of Biden: An Empirical Comment on the ‘Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands’

Biden is the nearest thing we’ve had to a blue-collar president in more than a generation, and he’s made labor a cornerstone of his administration. It is good that he wants to revive industries, fix infrastructure, improve public works and build clean energy sources.

Mr. Biden has “gestured in interesting ways in certain moments,” said Gabriel Winant, a labor historian at the University of Chicago. It doesn’t seem like he has the stomach to see the gestures.

Editor’s Note: Lawrence Downes was an editor and writer for The New York Times. He is the co-author, with Linda Ronstadt, of “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Making America Great: Addressing Jobs and Immigrants in the U.S. Trade Address of Joe Biden at the State of the Union

During the State of the Union address President Joe Biden talked about jobs and workers. That was expected — the address is a report card, and presidents love to brag about their grades, in this case booming job numbers and the lowest unemployment rate since 1969.

For a president whose bywords are “infrastructure” and “made in America,” the speech was a perfect moment to summon the nation to a great industrial renewal.

Who are these people, he was talking about? They include millions of people he barely mentioned — undocumented workers living in legal limbo, stranded by the failure of immigration reform. Biden gave that issue its traditional glancing mention deep in the laundry-list section of the speech — a little bit after he spoke about “junk” hotel surcharges and identity fraud, when he urged Congress to fix our “border problems.”

What a blown opportunity, especially in a time of rampant xenophobia, anti-immigrant violence and the zero-sum, border-obsessed politics that are former President Donald Trump’s toxic gift to the national discourse.

But on Tuesday he needed to go further — to connect the industrial dots, to defy the mindset about immigrants that separates “them” from “us,” to make it clear that supporting American workers and doing right by America’s immigrants are essentially the same thing.

Because most Americans in reflective vests, steel-toe boots, drive-through booths, and checkout lines are more similar to immigrant day laborers or nannies than to the right-wing politicians and media people who stoke America with rage about foreign-born.

Hope can be hard to suppress, and immigrants’ determination can prompt leaders into action. Former President Barack Obama ran a prodigious deportation campaign, but he also created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to protect young immigrant “Dreamers” — a bold executive move that did more for immigrants than Congress has in decades. Those young immigrants pushed Obama to do the right thing. Biden can also follow in the footsteps of immigrant workers.

It’s a smart, bold move that protects the rights of all workers, including native-born Americans. If Biden wants to be the labor president, he should be hitting this point hard and often. Labor protections can’t be offered only to certain groups of workers, as immigrants without papers are abused and exploited. We can’t keep deferring justice until some illusory goal is met — until a 2,000-mile wall is built or Congress passes an immigration bill or some other future thing happens.

And we can’t keep delegating immigration policy to governors in states like Texas and Florida, whose cruel, useless stunts include busing immigrants across the country in the dead of winter and dumping shipping containers on the border and calling it a wall.

It is Biden who will finish the job. Starting now, he can focus on the ways his administration is going to honor immigrants’ contributions to the state of this union. He can protect and support them so that they can do great things.

What if Biden had made the State of the Union call for Congress to fix things instead of teaming up with day laborers to sign them up as workplace whistle blowers?

He promised to go to the memorial service for the immigrant essential workers who died during the epidemic so the other people could stay safe at home. What if he proposed immigration relief for their surviving relatives — citizenship to honor their ultimate sacrifice?

Republicans would be angry. But of course they would. They do not care about the injustice of millions who are working on the edge of survival. They use immigrants as bait, saying the wrong people should have been blamed for the problems.

It’s an old story, and many native-born keep falling for it. On Long Island, where I live, people spent years arguing over immigrant day laborers — and missing the point completely. The gap in labor was filled by the workers, who were needed for jobs that contractors or homeowners would not do themselves. The hostility was milked by politicians and talk-show hosts. Workers were viciously attacked and sometimes hunted and killed.

It was the case around the country. One day a real estate developer turned entertainer claimed that some Mexican immigrants were rapists, and then said that he was running for president to deal with them. He said America was a dumping ground for the world. The opinion journalists seemed very curious to see a new celebrity shake up the politics.

The entertainer won the presidency and four years of hatred followed. Children were torn from their parents by federal agents. People were turned away from the border because of their immigration status. Unprecedented limits on asylum also made conditions more dangerous. For decades, migrants have died crossing the burning Sonoran Desert; under the Trump administration, others battled freezing temperatures in refugee camps beside the Rio Grande as asylum seekers were forced to wait outside the US while their cases were pending. In 2019, a gunman slaughtered dozens of Latinos at a WalMart in El Paso, Texas, after posting an online manifesto that repeated Republican talking points about a “Hispanic invasion,” according to police.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/opinions/biden-state-of-the-union-immigration-downes/index.html

Is Einstein’s Third Rail a Rail or Biden’s Fate? The Case of the Fox News Pulsar-President Biden

Conventional political thinking says that immigration is a third rail and Biden will regret giving Fox News more things to rouse the rabble with.