I did one of those automated action alerts about immigrants rights--I believe it was a DREAM act one, but I can't remember from whence it came. Honestly, I get so many action alerts in a day I can't keep track. So I get this asenine response from some hapless DiFi staffer and I don't know if it was the lack of sleep, the utter inanity of the response, or a lingering homesickness that wishes I could rid California of the plight she wreaks upon us through sheer electoral power alone; I simply HAD to respond. I'm sure whatever intern was stuck reading this immediately put it in the "wingnut" category, but this is what happens when I'm working at 2am and suddenly get this kind of email from DiFi's office. It's a task they signed up for, goddammit.
Anyhow. She wrote:
On 12/5/05 8:38 PM, "senator@feinstein.senate.gov"
December 5, 2005
Mr. Max Toth
[my mailing address]
Dear Mr. Toth:
Thank you for writing me about a possible blanket amnesty.
I appreciate hearing from you.
I do not support blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants. As
the daughter of a Russian immigrant, I understand the hope and the
optimism with which countless others view our country. I believe
America is rooted in a tradition of newcomers working hard and
building a better life for themselves and their families. We must
balance this tradition, however, with our ability to integrate new
immigrants into the American society that follow the proper
channels to legal immigration. Our ability to accept immigrants and
our immigration policy must support and strengthen families, create
economic opportunities, increase scientific and cultural resources,
and fulfill humanitarian commitments.
Again, thank you for writing to me. If you have any further
questions or comments on this or any other issue, please do not
hesitate to call my Washington, D.C. staff at (202) 224-3841.
Sincerely yours,
Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator
http://feinstein.senate.gov
Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the Nation are available at my website http://feinstein.senate.gov. You can also receive electronic e-mail updates by subscribing to my e-mail list at http://feinstein.senate.gov/issue.html.
to which I replied, in a fit of pique...
Dear Senator Feinstein,
I appreciate that your office responded to my email. To be frank, we strongly disagree on a number of key issues. Given your stances on many concerns that I would find important, I'm basically appalled that you still identify as a Democrat, and I can't wait for the 2006 elections, and hope that an actual progressive candidate runs as a challenger to your post. When or if they do, I would gleefully work around the clock on their campaign until you are forced into the retirement that we, the people you purport to represent, so richly deserve. I find it particularly galling that your base of operations for years in the state of my birth is our beloved progressive bastion of San Francisco, home to many hardworking-if-undocumented people who are terrorized into poverty wages, otherwise known as a substantial portion of the economic base of California.
Until then, unfortunately, I am required by our supposedly democratic political system to beg you to bother to be progressive. We both know that will not happen unless poor people are able to scrounge the campaign largesse required to be properly represented. However, as I feel compelled to do what I find just in this society, I will continue to send you missives about what I'd like you to do were you to actually represent me and scores of people who live in this city, as well as the state. Were you to suddenly change your views around this issue and a number of others (say, your continually hawkish stance towards the war we're waging in Iraq, among others) I would vote for you. Lots of my friends would, too. But as of now, I apologize to people that I was sufficiently unaware of electoral politics such that I made the mistake of voting for you in the first election I was allowed to participate in. At the time I was under the impression that "Democrat" and "progressive" were synonymous. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways.
As a senior Senator who attended Stanford, you couldn't have possibly missed the ways that US immigration policy throughout the course of history has been terribly racist, arbitrary, and designed to supply a vulnerable and easily-exploited workforce that could be deported at will. The title "Chinese Exclusion Act" doesn't leave much room for nuance, for instance. Nor for hope or optimism, if your ancestors were Chinese immigrant men in the 1800s. Low-income immigrants to the U.S. not only built the infrastructure of this country (that wasn't being built by enslaved Africans) but had to fight, and many died, attempting to guarantee the freedoms that spawned many deferred dreams--usually through labor organizing. The Democrats are supposed to be the champions of struggles for justice such as these.
For a more current analysis, I'm not surprised when I hear from many undocumented workers that it was not, in fact, a desire to fulfill a romantic notion of an American dream that led them to, say, risk their lives crossing a desert to be greeted by armed guards or worse, but in fact, the total economic devastation of the agrarian economy of Mexico due to cheap US imports dumped on them through NAFTA, wrecking their only means of supporting themselves and their families. So I don't care where your parents immigrated from, but I bet they got a fairer shake than the people who clean your office building, or mine, because of the color of their skin and the US's foreign policy towards their countries of origin. I know my Hungarian immigrant relatives did, even though I'm the first person to graduate college on my mother's side of the family, nor were my ancestors spared lung-destroying, gut-wrenching work in Pennsylvania coal mines. Because our families immigrated from Europe, we had access to infrastructure that this country has never granted equally to immigrants of Color, either by law or by selective enforcement.
So now I'll ask you to change your position. Will you? You know it's unfair. There's still time for you to create economic opportunities for people by allowing them to work free from the constant threats of deportation that employers use to force inhumane conditions upon many of those who make our state function, not by denying them.
Your constituent,
-Max Toth
Her office's reponse to this was to re-send the original email. Go figure.
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