Undocumented people are not able to vote, but they have built a movement that has changed laws, challenged politicians and presidents, and won in the U.S. Supreme Court. During the 2020 elections, some spoke out about the need to prevent the re-election of Donald Trump, the president who ordered the separation of detained parents from their children and attempted to end the DACA program for undocumented students. Some also got involved with local elections and issues as a way to develop allies and get ready for the struggles coming after the elections.
The most aware undocumented youth reject the narrative that the Dreamers are “good immigrants,” who arrived through no fault of their own and deserved jobs and freedom from deportation under DACA, while immigrants like their parents deserve to be criminalized and deported. These fighters express their hatred of being “unDACAmented” as their relatives, and the youth who didn’t qualify for DACA, remain the “undocumented-undocumented,” with no recognition or protection under the law at all.
The most socially conscious immigrants’ rights organizers realize that today they cannot just mobilize a “struggle for immigrants’ rights” within the existing system, because the whole economic and political system is no longer working. They have a commitment, passion, and knowledge about how to organize as a step towards going beyond the broken system we are in today. So, their fight for equal rights has to also move in the direction of uniting with other movements for basic needs and justice, to build toward the social destruction and conflict they know is coming.
This includes linking to people fighting for the needs of tenants, the homeless, and saving the environment. It also includes efforts to connect to parts of the wide array of organizations and forces fighting under the slogan of Black Lives Matter. They are looking at the experience of the movement against police killings of Blacks as they think over such issues as whether to work with the police when planning protests. Liberal leaders of immigrant assistance services claim they must work with the police to protect the undocumented from arrest at rallies, but organizers of BLM protests refuse to include police in their planning. Instead, they have shared with immigrant rights activists the ways they organize people to surround and protect legally vulnerable previously-incarcerated people at BLM protests.
Immigrant youth organizers are also training each other in the history of political and labor struggles, even questioning the actions of civil rights icons. They know about the United Farm Workers union strikes in the 1970s when Cesar Chavez called on the Border Patrol to arrest undocumented strike-breakers. The union finally stopped doing that as the ranks of immigrants grew, but this sad experience illustrates how capitalism pits laborers against themselves. The young leaders’ purpose is not to denigrate revered leaders, but to learn how the capitalist system insidiously turns workers against their own material and political class interests.
It is not lost on young immigrant leaders that these tragic lessons in history have occurred under both Democrat and Republican Administrations. They know that the last time comprehensive immigration reform occurred (sometimes called amnesty) was under a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who also was a rabid imperialist, responsible for the training of death squads that ran guns as well as drugs across Central America. They also know that Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency from 2008 to 2010 yet failed to deliver the “comprehensive immigration reform” they’d promised.
Instead, Obama issued his DACA Executive Order for young students while the great mass of undocumented remained in peril. Eventually, immigrants began mobilizing protests against the rising deportations carried out under the man they began calling “the Deporter-in-Chief.” But by then the movement which was so massive during the May 1, 2006 nationwide mobilizations against the Sensenbrenner bill had become much smaller. As a result, all immigrants were more vulnerable when the election of Trump led to huge new attacks on immigrant rights.
Now, the Trump Administration has stepped up both anti-immigrant rhetoric and punitive enforcement actions such as deportations and family separations, as a core part of his re-election campaign message. This has allowed the Democratic Party’s leadership to replay one part of the strategy they used under Obama – criticizing the Republicans and promising to fight for immigrants if they win control of the presidency and Congress, without actually presenting a plan to do so.
The reality is that no matter what happens in the elections, new tools are needed to dismantle the current system and its increasingly blatant abuse of immigrants. On September 14, the social action organization Project South filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security accusing Georgia’s Irwin County Detention Center of gross violations of the human rights of incarcerated immigrants, including repeated failures to protect them from COVID-19 infections and repeated hysterectomy surgeries, that resulted in sterilizations of immigrant women without their consent. These atrocities reflect an American tradition of forced sterilization of the most vulnerable members of the working class.
It’s a history that includes sterilizations of an uncounted mass of Native American women for over a century, as documented in the 1977 class-action lawsuit against the federal government filed by three anonymous Northern Cheyenne women in Montana. It includes a huge number of poor Black women over the decades, such as Alabama’s 1973 sterilization of Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf. And it includes Carrie Buck, a white woman who was the first person sterilized in Virginia under its 1927 law.
Today’s sterilization of immigrants and separation of their families are the legacy of a socio-economic system built on indigenous genocide, slave labor, and imperialist conquest in Latin America, which made the ruling class strong enough to ensure the ongoing exploitation of workers of all colors. The system’s abuse of immigrants cannot be ended without ending its ability to abuse any section of the poorest class of Americans. Young immigrant activists are consciously moving towards linking their struggle to that of others facing the same enemy. RC
November.December 2020 Vol30.Ed6
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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