In Italy Berlusconi turns illegals into criminals. The maximum sentence is 4 years. Meanwhile in the USA a similar shift to criminilazie migrants seems to be making headway.

300 hard working people who never committed a crime were arrested and given 5 months prison sentences. Their crime: being poor, coming from a country impoverished by the unfair US trading policies and State Department support for local oligarchies and dictators. See New York Times.

US government calls this an “astonishing success”:

• economically hurting 300 families, by throwing their breadwinners in prison,
• economically hurting the meatpacking plant, their employer, the largest producer of kosher meat in the US, by suddenly taking 300 of their workers away
• economically hurting every US taxpayer – because WE are now going to have to pay for housing and feeding those 300 people in federal prison for 5 months, instead of being beneficiaries of the taxes they pay on their earnings

In the times of $4/gallon of gas, foreclosures on homeowners, and other economic maladies that plague US society today, how can an action as economically hurtful as this one be called an astonishing
success?

What is so successful about it? Where are the gains? Law needs to be in service of human prosperity, not the other way around.

It is all about sending a message. It is all about showing that we will be tough on illegal immigration. It is all about politics. There is no difference between this action and the monster processes tried before Stalin’s judges in USSR of 1930-s: behind both there was a malignant will of the waning regime. CHANGE. We need change.

Ivo Skoric
1773 Lexington Ave
New York NY 10029
212.369.9197
ivo@balkansnet.org

http://balkansnet.org