Author: hankkalet

This may seem like great news for Hillary Clinton, but I’m not sure this is all that wonderful for the rest of us.

But not because I have anything for or against the former senator and secretary of state. This issue is not her — or the various political names listed in this Quinnipiac poll — but the fact that we are running polls like this in early March 2013, with the next presidential election still three years and eight months away.

The problem is that polls like this contribute to a degradation of our politics by turning every question into one about the White House. They take the focus away from the other two branches and state-level races. They make it seem like the only important question in politics is who resides in the White House.
We have four years ahead of us before that can change. Barack Obama is president now and has a long agenda he wishes to carry out. Whether Clinton or Jeb Bush or even Chris Christie will be running to replace him is not particularly relevant.

What is relevant, however, is who is sitting in Congress, working on the legislation or stalling it; what is important is how the courts function and who sits in the statehouses and city halls around the country

Hillary Clinton may become president in four years, but she isn’t now.

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A sign on the side of Emanuel Lutheran Church in New Brunswick. These are words to live by.

Margot Traverso had to make what she calls an impossible decision.

It was nearly eight years ago and her husband, Osmark Bruemmer Gonzales, remained undocumented. The couple had gotten married in 2005 and decided to try and legalize Gonzales’ immigration status, assuming that their marriage would allow for an orderly process.

They were wrong, and their effort to “do the right thing,” as Traverso said, has landed the couple and their two young children in Vera Cruz, Mexico, where they are waiting out a 10-year bar on Gonzales’ re-entry into the United States.

The reason is the so-called 10-year bar, under which immigrants who are “unlawfully present” in the United States for more than a year must return to their country of origin, where they can apply for a waiver. However, if the immigrant in question has entered more than once – as Gonzales did – he or she is barred for life, though there is a slim possibility that he or she could qualify for a pardon or a waiver.

“When this happened in 2005, my choices were to stay in New Jersey without him for 10 years, or I can leave my whole life for Mexico,” she said. “These are not very good options for a U.S. citizen. The family values were very important to me.”

“To me, the best choice was to keep the core family in tact,” she said later. “I had to leave my aging father, my sister, my career – it was almost like there is no good choices.”

Gonzales first came to the states in 1992 when he was about 18 years old, Traverso said. He stayed about six years and then returned to southern Mexico to visit his ailing mother in 1998. He headed north again a year later, eventually settling in Monmouth County where he met Traverso.

“He hadn’t seen his mother in six years,” Traverso said. “His mother was having health problems and he took that risk and now we are paying the consequences of it.”

The 10-year bar was created as part of the 1996 immigration reforms, passed by the Republican-controlled House and Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. Those reforms were meant to be a crackdown on illegal immigration, with the hope being that it would lead to a reduction in the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States.

As we know now, the byzantine rules the ’96 reforms put in place have been a miserable failure. There now are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country who have to live in the shadows. While there seems to be some energy pushing the nation toward larger immigration reforms, public debate remains mired in a pointless discussion over border security and conservative demands that there be no amnesty.

The hope is that comprehensive reform will offer a path to legal residency and citizenship for the bulk of the undocumented immigrants and that we will come to the realization that allowing capital to move freely across borders but not people is inhumane.

Comprehensive reforms remain a pipe dream, despite proposals from the president and a bipartisan group of eight senators, so we have been watching President Obama institute small-bore, incremental reforms like the deferred action program for children and a family unification program that will do nothing for Traverso and Gonzales and the thousands of so-called mixed-status families like them. Many live separate lives, while others – like Traverso and Gonzales – find themselves living far from where they consider their home to be.

The family unification rules, which took effect yesterday,are designed to streamline the process for mixed-status families to obtain their visas and green cards. Undocumented immigrants can now apply for a re-entry waiver before they leave the country (they must return to their home country to obtain their visa), which is supposed to reduce the amount of time they must spend outside the United States, while also making the visa trip less risky.

Traverso said the new rules are an improvement over the existing regimen, but they will do little for most of those caught in the mixed-status web because they only apply to immigrants with a single entry into the states and they are not retroactive.

That means remaining in limbo unless comprehensive reform passes or the president widens the program.

“I am a United States citizen,” she said. “We feel United States citizens should have a priority. We just want to present our case before an immigration judge and let him weigh all of the factors.”

For more information on families with mixed-status, check out American Familes United.

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The lede on today’s sequestration story in The New York Times sums up the problem with the current debate over the federal budget fairly well:

Seventeen months after President Obama signed doomsday budget legislation that was never intended to become law, the sweeping spending reductions in the measure have been imposed.

The issue here is not just that the “sweeping budget reductions,” as the Times calls them, are now taking place, or that they will damage a fragile (at best) economic recovery. The issue is that the entire sequestration process was a sham that underscores how broken our political system has become.

And what better way to express this issue than by admitting that a law passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president “was never intended to become law.”

To rephrase: The president signed a law that was not supposed to be law. And now we have both sides accusing the other of bad faith as we wait for the painful cuts to take effect — with Republicans like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie saying it is up to the president to strike a compromise (why is it he only weighs in on national issues, aside from Sandy, when he can do damage to Democrats?) or John Boehner saying the House had done its part (what, by sitting on the sidelines for the last two months?).

Let me say, up front, that I think the blame here is with the Republicans, though I want to add that Democratic failures in 2011 helped lay the ground for a bad compromise.

But none of that really matters now. What we have is foolish legislation taking effect that both sides admit they never wanted to take effect. That, for me, is the definition of delusional.

The Times of Trenton editorialized today on the growing problem of homeless students, calling on Trenton schools to make sure they’re providing adequate services. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it misses the forest for the trees

The 200 or so homeless children are an indication that something very wrong is happening in the region.

Mercer has among the best homelessness programs in the state, but the numbers are proof that even a comprehensive, housing first approach has its limits. The issue is both a lack of housing and, more importantly, the failures of a corporate capitalism that values profit and nothing else. Until we address this breakdown, there are minor enough programs to keep people — or even kids — of the streets.