Because we live here and grew up here and have not had our civil rights enforced so that we may equally participate in the employment process. That should be self evident. Being condemned to live on inadequate disability benefits with little to no chance to improve one's financial status leads to a life of hopelessness and dire poverty. You try it. </blockquote>
To advocate for rights of the disabled consistently, though, we have to advocate for their rights regardless of their countries of origin and immigration status (authorized or unauthorized, temporary or permanent, visitors, students, investors, or workers, whatever). It's not as if disabled Americans or Japanese would be dearer to me than, say, disabled Latinos, Iranians, or Russians.
Marta wrote: <blockquote> During World War II when there were less able bodied men in the labor force, the disabled employment rate improved greatly. The reason for that was that there were fewer people in the country to take the jobs and so employers would hire disabled people. When soldiers returned home many disabled people lost their jobs to the able bodied once again. We have never regained that level of employment.</blockquote>
The Sandwichman has proven that it's a myth that advocates for shorter work hours are believers in the "lump of labor" idea, but the fire of a "lump of labor" does burn intensely among those who are weary of immigrants!
The same setback happened to women and gay men and lesbians after World War II -- the setback that was due more to McCarthyism than to the return of able-bodied "straight" men -- but they have more than made up for that setback and advanced further since then. We have to do the same for the disabled.
The US economy, still the biggest in the world, can make jobs for most who want to work and European-level benefits for all who can't work or are unemployed for various reasons, if we had a labor movement as powerful as Europeans'. To get there, new Latino immigrants -- a significant number of whom learned a thing or two about left-wing organizing at home -- will be indispensable.
In the near future, though, there will probably be a pretty bad recession the way the housing market and the oil prices are going. When that happens, lots of migrant workers may be pressured to leave. Their departure (leaving "voluntarily" or getting deported) is likely to coincide with another setback for the disabled and all other categories of workers.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>