The New York Times editorial, Gitmos Across America, well illustrates the kind of abuse immigrants in the US can face, legal ones or not. And once again illustrates, as I’ve written before, that it is the fact that because the rights of illegal immigrants are not spelled out, they are left open for abuse and exploitation.
From the editorial
The cells would be full of people who shouldn’t be there: asylum seekers, the elderly, pregnant women, the sick and those ensnared in paperwork mistakes. Children, like the kindergartners in inmate scrubs walking the halls of a federal detention center outside Austin, Tex. Day laborers, like those in suburban Brewster, N.Y., whose arrests were hailed by a mayor who spoke proudly of his community’s “zero tolerance†for people unlawfully playing soccer in a schoolyard.
The country already detains some 230,000 immigrants a year, at an annual cost of $1.2 billion. Under the current immigration bill, it would build tens of thousands more beds to hold detainees. And it would need many more — Guantánamo Bays across America — if Mr. Graham’s zero-tolerance vision is fully realized.
This flavor of so-called immigration reform will only serve to put more power in the hands of those who benefit by knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. Why aren’t any of the US presidental candidates saying anything about this? What about it Senator Obama? What about it Senator Clinton? It doesn’t take a genius to see that these bills don’t address the problem as long as illegals are in legal limbo in the US.