Support the Green Party Candidate: Jill Stein
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is a mother, housewife, physician, longtime teacher of internal medicine, and pioneering environmental-health advocate.
In her native Massachusetts, she has led successful campaigns to clean up coal-fired power plants, to get mercury and dioxin out of the air, water, and food supply, and to decrease the influence of corporate money in state politics.
As a candidate for the Green-Rainbow Party, Dr. Stein has run for governor, state representative, and secretary of state in Massachusetts, where she received 350,000 votes which represented the greatest vote total ever for a Green-Rainbow candidate.
The Tribuno del Pueblo interviewed Stein shortly after the Green Party convention this summer in Baltimore.
TP—Where do you and the Green Party stand on immigration generally?
JS—We believe immigrant rights are part of human rights. We need to create a welcoming and legal path to full citizenship. We also believe that the demagoguery that promotes racial profiling and the demonization of immigrants should be repudiated.
TP—Would you comment on the Arizona anti-immigrant law and its copycats in other states?
JS—These are racial-profiling laws and should be treated as violations of civil rights—misguided, harmful, and unnecessary.
TP—Why is it that these laws arise at a time when the U.S. has economic problems?
JS—That goes a long way to explain what’s going on.
The real culprit and cause of economic struggle isn’t poor people or immigrants or people of color but rather Wall Sreet and the banks that conducted waste, fraud, and abuse and crashed the economy.
In addition, the wealth and resources of the nation are concentrated in the hands of a very few, which is disaster for our democracy and economy.
[The Arizona law] is political demagoguery that attempts to channel legitimate unrest and legitimate anxiety into a very destructive, racist framework that would target immigrants as the cause of joblessness.
TP—Can you comment on President Obama’s recent deferred-action program for young immigrants without papers?
JS—I would put this in the context of the S-Comm program, carried out by this president cruelly and shamefully over his four years. He deported more immigrants in his first three years than George W. Bush deported in his entire eight-year term—over 1 million immigrants deported, families divided, children shamefully taken from their parents.
This is a human-rights catastrophe. The president’s recent action allowing two-year work permits up to the age of 30 for DREAMers is a small step in the right direction but a day late and a dollar short.
We need a welcoming path to full citizenship, not towards a worker permit plan which only covers a small fraction of the immigrants who are essential members of our economy and our community.
