Over 500 social justice advocacy groups have signed on to a letter demanding that President Obama take important action on immigrant justice, and now its your turn to get involved!
This letter makes the much overdue call for an end to the 287(g) program that allows local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws. The program has resulted in racial profiling of Latino communities, mass incarceration and deplorable human rights violations in places like Maricopa County, AZ, where inmates have been poisoned and publicly humiliated by racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Now is THE time to get on board and let the President know that you support this coalition and the END OF THE 287(g) PROGRAM! Click here to send an email to your Congress people and the President through the Detention Watch Network!
I laughed my ass off at this video. “My Unicorn gave birth last night” and “We have one job here and thats to kill old people and serve a liberal fourth reich” are two of my favorite quotes.
Making fun of rediculous right-wing propaganda = funny. The fact that this propaganda is actually scaring Seniors and might lead to end of life care being excluded from the health reform bill = not funny at all. Its disgusting, really. So, while we’re all having a laugh, lets make sure to take action to guarantee quality, affordable and accessible health coverage in America!
This video is a must see for anyone interested in immigrant rights, racial justice, and the connections between them.
Rinku Sen, Executive Director of the Applied Research Center and author of The Accidental American, breaks down the images used by both sides of the immigration debate. She rightfully calls out anti-immigrant rhetoric for characterizing immigrants as both “job-stealers” and as “criminals,” but the true insight comes through in her analysis of the ways that images of immigrants evoked by pro-immigrant communities can also be harmful.
Specifically, she cites the argument that many of us on the Left have used to defend immigrant rights – “Immigrants are innocent hard workers, not the real criminals we should be worried about.” This, of course, implies that there are both lazy workers and “real criminals” that we should be worried about, which plays into the terribly destructive stereotype of Black Americans as criminals. As Sen explains,
These framing decisions that we make, we’re not making them in a vacuum, we’re making them on top of hundreds of years of stereotypes and images and pictures and stories and myths that have established characters in our country….One of the things that has…been enabled by this framing on both sides is the expanded criminalization of not just of immigrants but of US born people of color, Black and Latino people in particular.
In other words, relying on rhetoric that simply points the finger elsewhere can result in increased criminalization of both immigrant communities and US born communities of color.
Instead, Sen chooses to focus on highlighting the downside of criminalizing immigrants and demonstrate how thats connected to the downside of criminalizing US born communities. One way the Applied Research Center does this is by telling stories that highlight the conflict between two sets of deeply held American values, fairness and due process on one hand and patriotism and national security on the other.
I really like this approach. As activists, we must be careful about how we frame our arguments and be mindful of the unintended effects they can have. Rather than playing off of America’s fear of criminals, Sen argues for using our (supposed) commitment to fairness and family values to reveal the contradiction between these values and the way the American criminal “justice” system treats both immigrants and US born folks of color.
At a time when so many communities are facing terrible hardships, its easy to get sucked into whatever rhetoric seems like the best argument at the time, even when its at the expense of another marginalized community. But Sen reminds us that we must resist falling into that trap and work instead to strengthen social and economic justice movements that attack oppression at the roots.
