Amnesty for Immigrant Workers and Civil Rights for All

By Todd "Todd Chretien" Chretien

Immigrant workers and civil rights

We need a new civil rights movement in the country. Hurricane Katrina exposed the racist contempt our government has for the lives of poor and Black people. Things are no different in California. The prison-building boom has filled our jails with poor people. There are more Black men on death row in San Quentin then there are in the freshman class at UC Berkeley, just ten miles down the road.

We must transform the prison-building boom, into a school and hospital-building boom, and we must end the "Three Strikes" law, which fills our prisons with people whose only crime is that they are poor and disenfranchised. On December 13, 2005, African-American peacemaker Stan Tookie Williams was executed. In January of 2006, Clarence Ray Allen, a Choctaw Cherokee man was executed. In February, Michael Morales, a Latino man was scheduled to die, but was saved because the courts ruled that lethan injection was cruel and unusual punishment. No more proof is needed to show the death penalty targets the poor and people of color. The State Legislature should immediately pass AB 1121, placing a two-year moratorium on the death penalty.

In the last ten years, 4,000 people have died in the California and Arizona deserts trying to cross the border. Everyone knows that California's economy depends on undocumented workers from Latin American, Asia and the Philippines. Yet, employers and politicians want to keep them in an apartheid-like status. Immigrant workers deserve to be treated with respect. I support drivers licenses and amnesty for undocumented workers so that they can work to put food on their families' tables. And, I believe we need to demilitarize the border with Mexico.