What Is Nancy Pelosi For, Anyway?

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Duke has an essay over at The Sanctuary about Nancy Pelosi’s latest capitulation, this time on the subject of immigration.

According to the essay, Pelosi was talking about comprehensive immigration reform and decided to throw under the bus the idea of a real path to citizenship for many of the 12 million undocumented workers in this country.

The link in the essay to the LA Times article is not working, but here is the money quote:

…Pelosi also said Congress would have to tackle the politically sticky job of overhauling immigration laws in the new Congress, after a bipartisan measure collapsed last year.

The estimated 12 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally “are part of the U.S. economy. We cannot send them all home, and we cannot send them all to jail, so we have to address it,” Pelosi said.

Any solution would have to be bipartisan, she said, so it may require sacrificing some of Democrats’ past priorities, such as giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

“Maybe there never is a path to citizenship if you came here illegally,” Pelosi said. “I would hope that there could be, but maybe there isn’t.”

As Duke states, the egregious policies of the Repubs have drawn Latino immigrants in waves to the Democratic Party.

Yet here we have Pelosi, once again, speaking of capitulation and calling it “bipartisanship.”

In the diversosphere there’s a lot of good information about this story.

Duke continues his analysis over at his blog Migra Matters:

While stating that ” We cannot send them all home, and we cannot send them all to jail, so we have to address it”, she goes on to say that full legalization could be off the table.

This leads one to speculate as to exactly what kind of status Ms. Pelosi has in mind for these 12 million souls.

If they are in fact not to be put on a path to citizenship, yet not sent home, it’s safe to assume Ms Pelosi intends that they stay here in with some sort of “other” status. That of perhaps guest workers who never need return home, yet never become full members of society.

There are words for that class of person …a permanent under class, Braceros, indentured servants.

This is not the deal the Democrats made with this constituency.

Every demographic survey done in the last ten years points to the growing political power of Latinos, new immigrants, and those born during the current wave immigration from 1965 until the present of immigrant parents. Every poll done of this important demographic shows that immigration reform and a just, humane, and practical immigration system are a key concern.

Now, only weeks before the election, with what she believes is her majority sewn up tight, Speaker Pelosi revels that perhaps the promises made in the past were for naught, and in the spirit of “bipartisanship” she’s willing to sell out this core constituency.

From yave at Citizen Orange:

I for one am not going to sit back and quietly give the Democratic Party a pass on immigrant rights. Nancy Pelosi–and the party more broadly–needs to understand that we will make noise about this. If they believe they can sell immigrant communities down the river AGAIN next year, we will show them otherwise.

If they thought we’ve been tough on the GOP, they haven’t seen anything yet. The thing is, we didn’t expect the Bush administration to listen to us. They have ignored us for the last 8 years; we grew accustomed to it.

We don’t like being ignored by the people many of us plan to vote for. I, at least, plan to let them know.

(And since when do politicians start breaking promises before the election? Duke is right: WTF?)

Manny over at Latino Politico is also on this story:

At best, Speaker Pelosi’s comments were taken out of context or simply misquoted, but the alternative that I suspect is that she was testing the waters to see if a path to citizenship would be politically expedient to compromise upon when the next Congress is gaveled into session (hopefully under a President Obama). These are seasoned public speakers, and especially when they’re chatting to a member of the press, every single word that exits their lips has a reason behind it.

So let me make it absolutely clear to the leadership of the Democratic Party: There is no compromise on a path to citizenship for the hard-working family members within the borders of this country who have fallen out of legal standing or are simply undocumented. What a bone-headed statement to make two weeks out from the election when there are literally millions of volunteers and dollar bills bankrolling efforts to get out the vote among the latino community.

The enforcement-only policies of this government have savaged communities of color, especially the greater latino community, by gestapo-like tactics of rogue sheriffs and ICE agents. They bust into homes and businesses armed like they’re rading a building in Falujah, snaring hard workers who have the unfortunate and unchangeable suspicion of being “foreign”. The racial profiling, the neglect of connected family members, the malpractice of medicine in the gulag system of prisons are all violations of human rights and it is far past the time that they are stopped.

And Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican has this to say (and does a great job of synthesizing what many other bloggers are saying, I urge anyone interested to check out his post):

I’d love to believe in the USA’s ideals. In fact, I do believe in many of them because as penned, they are damn good ideals. But we ain’t living them in far too many instances. So if Democrats are going to back away from this before they even make it in the White House, what the hell can we expect from them once in power? Oh, how that Nancy Pelosi loves to swipe things off the table…

It is very difficult to make this understandable to folks who have not followed what has been going on in the USA when it comes to immigration.  It’s a complicated topic, further complicated by so much hate speech coming from organized astroturf groups who have dominated the national conversation for too many years.

Most of us have read or heard about the raids on communities where undocumented workers are taken off in chains, separated from their children, railroaded through our legal system, entire families put in Halliburton-built detention centers, where many have died.  That is the blatantly ugly face of what is happening to human beings and their human rights in the United States of America.

There are solutions to the problems we face when it comes to immigration, comprehensive solutions that have been delayed for far too long and that delay has caused great suffering not only to undocumented workers but to their communities as well, both economically and psychologically.

For Nancy Pelosi to make such an irresponsible statement in the name of “bipartisanship” is further proof, if any is needed, that she does not deserve a place in the leadership of the Democratic Party.

I hope we all work very hard after the election to see that she is taken down.  As Obama said many times about McCain, I will say about her … Nancy Pelosi just “doesn’t get it.”