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.
Thanks to 
