10 | SEPTEMBER 19 • 2019
Views
Not A New Problem
Your readers’
comments
about the treatment of
immigrants at our border
with Mexico prompts me to
add to the discussion.
Recently I read A Bintel
Brief: Sixty Years of Letters
from the Lower East Side to
the Jewish Daily Forward
(Doubleday, New York,
1971). In it, I read a letter
written in 1909, but which
eerily describes the current
situation at the border. One
hundred mostly Russian
Jewish males, “unfortunates
who are imprisoned on Ellis
Island,” wanted the world
to know about their living
conditions there:
“We are packed into a
room where there is space
for 200 people, but they
have crammed in about
1,000. They don’
t let us
out into the yard for a little
fresh air. We lie about on
the floor in the spittle and
filth. We’
re wearing the same
shirts for three or four weeks
because we don’
t have our
baggage with us.
“Everyone goes around
dejected and cries and wails.
Women with little babies,
who have come to their
husbands, are being detained
… men are separated from
their wives and children.
Children get sick. They are
taken to a hospital, and it
often happens that they
never come back.” (p.98-
100)
Since that letter appeared
110 years ago in the The
Forward, Congress made
periodic reviews and updates
of our immigration and
naturalization law. It is not
as if Congress vegetated —
between wars and economic
crises they’
ve enacted
legislation providing Social
Security, Medicare, Medicaid
and other beneficial
programs. Legislation that
provides humane treatment
for large numbers of
refugees, however, remains
little more than a campaign
promise of 21st-century
election cycles.
Development of a
workable, affordable
letters
Detroit Edison, Michigan
Consolidated Gas Company
(MichCon) and Michigan Bell
were putting up structural
barriers to families when they
most needed reliable utilities.
The hefty deposit for new cus-
tomers, rigid billing practices
and bureaucratic penalties —
all by regulated utilities — put
low-income families at undue
risk of being cut off and left
out in the cold.
3. Nothing about us with-
out us. The University of
Detroit law clinic agreed to
represent Westside Moms in
their action against the util-
ities. After U of D secured
power of attorney and reached
a serviceable settlement with-
out consulting with their
clients, Westside Moms fired
them and rejected the settle-
ment. Instead, they worked
directly with the Public
Service Commission for more
favorable terms with Detroit
Edison.
Westside Mothers went on
to win one lawsuit after anoth-
er, securing, among other
things, an annual clothing
allowance, standardized criteria
for free school lunches and
rules prohibiting schools from
using “dry lunch” as a way to
punish misbehaving students.
Selma never represented
Westside Moms without at
least one of them present and
empowered to speak to her
own experiences.
For all its judicial and regu-
latory success, Westside Moms
was just as persistent in the
court of public opinion. They
picketed Michcon for weeks
before securing a first-of-its-
kind payment play for ADC
families that guaranteed no
shutoffs for participants.
In 1981 (“Julia was 17”),
Westside Mothers marched
100 miles to Lansing to pre-
vent welfare payments from
being cut 5 percent. “Hello,
Mrs. Goode,” Gov. Milliken’
s
plain-clothes bodyguards
would say with grudging
respect and peace of mind
that her stated goal to “hound
Milliken to death” was figu-
rative.
To boot, Selma wrote the
editors of the Detroit Free Press,
“We do need ‘
reform’
in the
food stamp program. Get rid
of the phonies, who exist more
in President Ford’
s imagination
than in reality … but make
food stamps available to those
in need. That $50 a month
bonus for a low-income family
can be just enough to keep a
family together.”
At its peak, Westside
Mothers boasted 2,500
dues-paying members, whose
advocacy has touched millions
of lives. All the more remark-
able to have captured such
solidarity among the sick and
tired — parents who just want
their kids to have a chance
at a better life. Parents who
needed to hear the hook from
Westside Mothers’
print mate-
rials and Selma’
s stories so they
could move from the singular
to the plural:
“No problem is more
important than yours ...”
Jewfro from page 5
Tobin from page 8
in solidifying the alliance with
Israel. The U.S. withdrawal
from the 2015 nuclear deal and
the re-imposition of devastating
sanctions that have brought
Iran’
s economy to its knees soon
followed.
Still, having achieved so
much, despite the opposition
of the Democrats at home and
America’
s feckless European allies
abroad, T
rump is now interested
in talking with the Iranians.
That appalled Bolton, as it did
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. Both believe that
negotiations with Islamist
dictators will never achieve a
thing, and both fear that talks
with Iran will inevitably lead to
appeasement.
In theory, such a meeting
doesn’
t undermine the “max-
imum pressure” policy that
Pompeo and Bolton have been
implementing. Indeed, an
Iranian realization that they
must talk with the United States
and make concessions was the
goal of that policy, not a war
that no one wants.
No harm will come from a
meeting as long as the president
and his team stand their ground
on the nuclear and terrorism
issues. Most importantly, they
must not pay for a photo oppor-
tunity by lifting the sanctions
that are backing the Iranians
into a corner.
Though he might not have
enjoyed working with Bolton,
T
rump benefited from his hard-
boiled and realistic view of bad
international actors. If the pres-
ident chooses to listen instead
to the voices urging him to
undermine America’
s long-term
security interests by abandoning
its overseas responsibilities, then
we may look back at this as the
moment when Trump started to
repeat some of Obama’
s mistakes
in the Middle East.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of
JNS — Jewish News Syndicate.
continued on page 12