Archive for January, 2009

DREAM Act and Immigrant Kids

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Daily Kos has a post about the DREAM Act:

Each year approximately 2.8 million students graduate from US High Schools. Some will go on to college, join the military, or take other paths in life, hopefully all becoming productive members of society.

But for approximately 65,000 of them, these opportunities will never be available. Not because they lack motivation, or achievement, but because of the undocumented status passed on to them by their parents.

The DREAM Act would allow these kids to do the things other people take for granted like being able to go to college, get a driver’s license, and get a job. It would allow them to participate fully in society, in the only country they know.

There are a couple of videos in the post. The first one was produced by Theresa Thanjan and me, and the music was composed by John Plenge. Theresa and I also did a music video of a song, ‘I have a dream,’ written by a couple of the kids.

Can Gurcharan Das Learn from Krugman?

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

Two very different op-eds in the New York Times that make an interesting juxtaposition. The first, by Gurcharan Das (Das is a right wing thinker– neo-liberal, anti-reservation, but not a Hindutva sympathizer) which has an essentialist, “India Shining” trajectory with a Reaganite twist:

….common saying among Indians that “our economy grows at night when the government is asleep.”

And the second, by Paul Krugman talks about the Republican contempt for government as being a product of its decision to “make itself the party of racial backlash”

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.