{"id":94,"date":"2011-10-05T15:37:43","date_gmt":"2011-10-05T22:37:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arroya.org\/?p=94"},"modified":"2011-10-05T15:37:43","modified_gmt":"2011-10-05T22:37:43","slug":"east-is-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.arroya.org\/?p=94","title":{"rendered":"East is East…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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"I grow squash and tomatoes....I am a farmer."<\/p><\/div>\n

There was an excellent article in the NYTimes, Oct. 2, 2011 about the complexity of immigration—the laws, the families pulled apart, the good hard-working people, and the dark side of immigration with its thugs, drug smugglers and thieves. And then I read the “comments” online, mostly East Coast folks. Chilling. Most comments were not supportive of the plight of the migrants. Most comments were lost in the verbiage of the law, as if we are a country that pays strict attention to laws. Don’t get me started on the Bush years, the wars, Wall Street, banks….<\/p>\n

So I am a caretaker, a nurse. People have blisters, I apply band-aids. People are hungry, I smile when the good sisters at the comedor feed them nourishing food. Friends clean out their closets and I take piles of jackets and jeans for the migrants that need warmth and comfort. I’m not spouting off statistics and numbers—my brain is too old for that.<\/p>\n

But I do have a bit of the body politic to share:
\n1) Rethink NAFTA. Many migrants are farmers that have been driven off their farms. The subsidized crops of NAFTA and huge agri-business farms undersell their crops of squash, beans, and tomatoes. We have created a class of poor farmers, many of whom survived quite nicely for hundreds of years. They are desperate for work. I have met them.
\n2) Legalize drugs. It is a public health issue, not a criminal one. As a nurse, I know this is blasphemous. But you know what?? The Drug War is a joke. It is easier and cheaper to get drugs on the street now than 10 years ago. Prohibition didn’t work, and neither is criminalizing the sale and use of narcotics and other “illegal” drugs. Start with marijuana.
\n3) Expand the guest worker permit system. I have never met a migrant from Mexico or Central America that didn’t want to work—at anything.
\n4) Allow a fast-track for immigrants who have been here in the US since they were children. Get a grip. There are 11 million undocumented people in this country. We’re not going to deport them. They have been here for most of there life. Except for a paper proving citizenship, they are “American.”<\/p>\n

Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.<\/p>\n

Trust me—-it’s more fun having Latinos as neighbors than….well, almost anybody.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was an excellent article in the NYTimes, Oct. 2, 2011 about the complexity of immigration—the laws, the families pulled apart, the good hard-working people, and the dark side of immigration with its thugs, drug smugglers and thieves. And then I read the “comments” online, mostly East Coast folks. Chilling. Most comments were not supportive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.arroya.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.arroya.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.arroya.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.arroya.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.arroya.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.arroya.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100,"href":"http:\/\/www.arroya.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.arroya.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.arroya.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.arroya.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}