Lessons from the Immigration/Inmigración 101 Workshop 2/11/17 (Also my thoughts, lots of them)
Immigration was already the issue I cared about most for selfish, personal reasons. Going to this workshop opened my eyes to how it is one of the largest moral failings of our times; I bet history classes in 2200 will damn us for how we treated the undocumented and our prisoners.
Read any comments section of an article on immigration and you won’t just get the immature trolling that happens in shady sections of the internet; it’s all the more painful for me to know how incredibly vulnerable these targets are, and how inhumanly they are treated online. From 8chan-ers who create fake Twitter hashtags so they can inform ICE of the undocumented people who respond to the heartless assholes who joke about mis-representing ICE facility addresses as safe spaces, it is astounding just how much humans want to cause other humans untold pain.
Seriously, where have the hearts of these people gone?
Undocumented persons are real human beings with families who eat meals with and care about their children. The deportation process is inhumane and extra-legal — an ICE agent who only has a warrant for one person in the apartment building will knock on the doors of other units in the building and sweep up anyone who doesn’t have their papers together. Then you are taken to a for-profit prison with conditions that violate basic human rights (we really need a contemporary Dorothea Dix). Then you get shipped off to somewhere with no one that you know (2/3rds of undocumented immigrants have been in the States for a decade or more). If your country of origin cannot take you, you are dumped across the Mexican border. You may have only the effects on your person and not be able to communicate in Spanish with anyone there.
Obviously this is a greater burden on the poor, who often try to re-cross the border — which is already very secure except for in the most dangerous desert areas — imagine having $100 in your bank account or less and trying to figure out what to do.
Okay, where are my notes. The Saturday meeting was well-attended with a diverse audience, maybe 30–40 people? Alderman Carlos Rosa of the 35th ward (this includes the neighborhoods of Albany Park, Logan Square, Hermosa, and others I don’t know because I can’t read ward maps) was the main presenter. It was nice to hear his bilingual presentation in Spanish and English (plus he’s only like 27! he was the youngest alderman to be elected in Chicago ever at 26).
You had a choice upon walking in of attending either the Know Your Rights workshop or the Immigration 101 workshop. I waffled quite a bit but finally decided to just go with the basics first. I still learned quite a lot despite being in the midst of immigration issues myself. I would highly encourage anyone to attend one of these if immigration is one of the issues you care most about; also you didn’t have to live in the 35th ward to attend. I live in the 3rd ward or something, which I just learned yesterday (it’s been fascinating to go to events and learn more about local government, as a brief aside.)
We started off with table introductions and a discussion of myths that we had heard about immigration. My table contained a lawyer and someone who was from a mixed-family household (this means that some family members have legal papers, while others are undocumented. Commonly the children may be US citizens while the parents are not). We discussed whether or not Chicago is a sanctuary city and that Obama had deported more immigrants than any other President; the deportation regime did not start with Trump.
On the topic of sanctuary cities — there’s no standard definition of a sanctuary city, and each city just declares itself one. Chicago has weaker protections than other sanctuary cities — our police cannot share data with ICE. However, since CPD (Chicago Police Department) has a data sharing agreement with other agencies, like the FBI, that means that ICE gets their hands on the CPD’s data anyways. The suburb of Oak Park has recently passed a model city ordinance that provides stronger protections (More details below (1)). New York delineates between violent felonies and non-violent felonies, and police can only cooperate in the case of violent ones. Some cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco have sanctuary agreements that refuse cooperation no matter the offense. The alderman highlighted that his office does not admit any ICE officials.
Another table brought up the great point that our language dehumanizes undocumented citizens — specifically, the legal language used is “alien” and the common term of “illegal”. I’m an alien, technically speaking. And in terms of the word “illegal” — the Alderman referred to it as the “i-word” — don’t use it. No human being is illegal. (Brief aside: if you don’t think language like this matters — it often allows you to deduce the speaker’s bias, as well as reduce it. In high school I told a friend it was uncomfortable to hear him use the phrase “that’s gay” because it equated something derogatory with homosexuality — later on, when he came out, he thanked me. An undocumented person will thank you for treating her as human).
Anyways, on to the myths presentation.
Myth 1: Undocumented immigrants are criminals.
You’ve heard this. Trump has said so and has even started to keep a list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants (apparently legal immigrants as well), much like the list kept by the Nazis in the newspaper “The Criminal Jew” (2).
The truth is that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born citizens. Like those white supremacist shooters the media likes to avoid talking about. (Maybe I need a tag or something to delineate my own thoughts from the alderman’s — any factual statements are his, and commentary mine).
Myth 2: Calling undocumented immigrations illegal is justified because they broke the law and are criminals.
Truth: Crossing the US border is a civil offense, not a criminal offense. I don’t know if most people know this, but there are two types of courts you can find remedy in — civil and criminal. I’m not a lawyer so I doubt I can effectively delineate between the two, but civil court cases are either cases involving a breach of contract between two parties (for example, I owe money to the credit card company and they take me to civil court if I don’t pay it) or for civil rights violations by the government. You also go to a civil court if you contest your speeding ticket, I believe. I guess a key difference may be the consequences the court orders — paying money vs going to jail.
The point is that not all law breaking results in one being labeled a criminal, and I’m sure most people who have driven have gotten a ticket at some time or other in their lives. And the problem is that when it comes to undocumented immigrants (as well as colored people), the rhetoric in the media labels them as criminals even if they have committed a civil offense.
I had a conversation today with someone close to me who -when we were discussing the case of Lupita in Arizona (3) (you know, the one where protesters physically put their bodies between the deportee and the ICE van (4)), and he pointed out that she was a criminal. I disagreed, because using a fake social security number is a civil offense, or should be. There is no physical violence being done to anyone. If there was identity theft, the remedy would be monetary — and I argued it wasn’t clear that she hadn’t used, for example, a deceased person’s social security number (who is being harmed in that case?)
I guess the difference between how heartless conservatives view undocumented immigrants and how others do is that they believe any law-breaking should be punished with jail time. Whereas I believe that there exist unjust laws and disproportionate penalties.
“Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?” — Henry David Thoreau
Should someone who downloaded millions of JStor articles get more prison time than someone who commits assault? Should an undocumented immigrant who uses fake papers be punished with time in jail (detention center)?
And yes, there is a tie-in with the whole prison-industrial complex around people of color and the war on drugs. That’s a whole essay in itself, though.
Myth 3: Undocumented people don’t pay taxes and drain public resources.
The truth is that many undocumented people do not qualify for or have the papers to qualify for public benefits. Especially benefits you have to be a US citizen to receive. On the other hand, they pay Social Security taxes into a system they cannot benefit from.
I mean, this is sort of a no-brainer, if you pay attention to any of the taxes you pay throughout your life. Like it’s pretty weird that people believe undocumented people have some magic way of getting around sales taxes, excise taxes, property taxes, and income taxes.
A study in California that I have to find showed that undocumented people contributed $1 billion more than they used in the state of California.
Alderman Rosa: “Who’s leeching off of whom?” As in, we get to use benefits that undocumented people can’t use and are paying for.
Myth 4: Unlike previous immigrants, today’s immigrants don’t want to learn English or assimilate.
Studies (that I have to find — why didn’t I ask for sources after the presentation? :’( ) show that Spanish-speaking immigrants are learning English faster than previous generations of immigrants. By the second generation many immigrant children do not speak Spanish anymore.
Myth 5: Undocumented immigrants “cut the line” in front of legal immigrants.
This is a fun one. (wow, I’m only on page 3 out of 11 pages of notes, I need to speed this up). I’ve written about the difficulty of becoming legal before. The truth is that there is no line. Especially for immigrants from countries where the visa waits are 20 years +, like Mexico and the Philippines. Historically America has always been welcoming of certain groups of people (think Western Europeans) and has completely barred others from immigrating (like the Chinese). The laws now provide no legal option for low skilled people, and even those with highly sought after skills are playing the lottery to get, for instance, an H1B.
The next section of the presentation was on the root causes of immigration. Much of the information is in this Nation article (5). This part I’ll gloss over since it’s covered in the Nation article (byline: “Impoverished by NAFTA, residents of Veracruz crossed the border to work in Smithfield’s Tar Heel slaughterhouse. Now, they’re condemned as ‘illegals.’”)- just know that NAFTA plays a big part as well as US funding of certain South American regimes. Although one note of interest — the first major US border operations coincide with the NAFTA rollout, so lawmakers had some inkling that the provisions in NAFTA would cause immigration.
I guess the above section has an accompanying myth: there are “push and pull” factors such as America being the land of opportunity and the home countries experiencing strife that cause immigration ; however, the US government has contributed to the strife.
There was a brief mention, related to Mexican border towns and migration, of the femicide in Juarez. There are a lot of intersectional issues tied up with immigration, and the sexual abuse of women workers in border factories is one of them.
Immigration enforcement was the next topic of the presentation. In 2016, the US spent $20 billion on immigration enforcement; $14 billion went to Border Patrol and $6 billion to ICE.
Obama was known as the “deporter-in-chief”, although let’s share the blame with Congress too. Congress makes it explicit in meetings with ICE and border patrol officials that it wants a return on all of the money they have allocated; a minimum of 400,000 people deported a year. That’s what Obama managed.
Since 2010, immigration from Mexico has been at a net zero due to deportations plus how strictly the border is enforced. We already have walls in place as well as sensors and drones to enforce the border; it is militarized. The only exceptions and areas with weak security are also the most treacherous areas, like the desert. Alderman Rosa gave us the story of Alfonso Martinez Sanchez who was deported and in the process of trying to return to his family via the desert, died of dehydration.
ICE has been moving away from federal run prisons to for-profit detention centers. Again, very clear ties to the prison-industrial complex. When Trump was elected, the stock of the Corrections Corporation of America went up.
Brief aside: I believe capitalism is the best economic system we have but profiting off of human misery should be damned in the lowest circles of Hell.
Back to the regularly scheduled programming…ICE has previously conducted raids of workplaces and homes. Despite reports in the Washington Post recently, there was only one Chicago home affected in the most recent rounds of raids. However, before that ICE raided a corner where migrant laborers waited for work somewhere near Belmont & California, I believe?
ICE operates extra-judicially (the alderman used the word extralegal) and this often results in “collateral detentions”. I think I already wrote about this in the beginning. Anyways, ICE will look for an “immigration fugitive” then also round up anyone else in the area. They take advantage of information sharing agreements the CPD has with the FBI, including a “gang database.” The information stored in these databases could be outdated and you could just be picked up for resembling the characteristics of someone else. City officials refer to it as Chicago’s “no fly list”.
A priority for deportation is if someone had been previously deported — just having been previously deported would mark someone as a criminal. I guess the point is that “criminal” is overused and its definition really depends upon whether you think non-violent crimes should be criminalized.
To reiterate: over 2/3rds of undocumented immigrants have lived in the US for a decade or more, and about 1/2 of them have US citizen children.
The alderman gave us the anecdote of Lilian Oliva Bardales, who tried to commit suicide in a for-profit detention center. Her suicide note read something like “You treat us worse than animals.”
I’ve heard that before, and so have you. It should be embedded in the consciousness of a post-slavery and post-Holocaust America that isn’t post-racist or post-anti-Semitic.
Briefly, a group of young undocumented immigrants — possibly DREAMers — was mentioned who had infiltrated a detention center to try to expose the horrible conditions there and taunted ICE officials to arrest them in 2012 or 2013. Need to follow up on that.
Also, if you are unclear on any of the terms used in this note, please let me know. A friend reminded me that immigration parlance is difficult to learn and foreign to many native-born US citizens. The privilege of not having to worry about your family being deported, I guess.
The final section of the presentation was called “Putting Our Neighborhoods First” and briefly went over how to help. I think someone also asked why the problem of human rights abuses weren’t being addressed, and the alderman responded that change is difficult, and the organizations fighting the fight are underfunded compared to ICE. The same goes for the fight against the prison-industrial complex in general.
SB1070, the harsh Arizona anti-immigration law, was mentioned as an example of what activists had been fighting against. There have been similar initiatives to try to deputize local police to act as ICE agents (287G was mentioned? and I think Trump issued an executive order saying something similar). “Secure Communities” is a phrase often used to justify the deportation regime.
Be wary of anti-immigrant rhetoric and mindful of rhetoric around “it’s okay to deport criminals”. My interpretation: this is because the definition of criminal is so broad.
In IL, there are about 500,000 undocumented immigrants at risk, 200,000 of which live in the city of Chicago. The alderman highlighted what an impact even losing a small percentage of immigrants would have, especially on children.
The 35th ward has a 3-phase plan to build community and defend neighbors. First: a knock on door campaign for neighbors to know their rights. More on that later.
Second: a community defense committee with a phone tree and a rapid response team in case of raids. There is a need to ensure that all units in an apartment building have lockable doors. Churches and schools can be utilized as sanctuaries. Phase three: intervene actively in deportation, as activists did in the case of Lupita. Questions and clarifications:
Chicago has been a sanctuary city since Harold Washington’s mayoralty, and I’ve written above what that actually means.
Seattle is another example of a city with better sanctuary policies; it is piloting a pre-arrest diversion program.
ICE has machines that check fingerprints at a raid. Pressing your finger to one indicates your willingness to give up your right to due process. Thankfully we have a Constitution that guarantees due process to everyone, not just citizens.
ICE racially profiles — a white man asked how come he has crossed the Mexican border several times by car without being asked to produce papers.
ICE treats mentally ill people especially poorly; a woman was deported who claimed she was from France but the French government said she wasn’t a national of theirs, so she was just put across the border in Mexico. In another case a 14 year old black woman with mental illness was mistaken for a 30 year old Honduran woman and deported to the Dominican Republic — yeah, it didn’t make sense to me either.
Deportation is a human rights violation that shouldn’t make sense in any context.
At the end of the meeting I went over to the next room, where the Know Your Rights workshop was wrapping up. The alderman gave an impassioned speech in Spanish first about the need to resist together — individual fingers are weak but a fist has force.
I got a Know Your Rights card (in case of ICE contact) and also signed up to receive more information on future sessions as well as how to host a session myself.
The Rights Card says:
I am giving you this card because I do not wish to speak to you or have any further contact with you.
I choose to exercise my right to remain silent and to refuse to answer any questions.
If you arrest me, I will continue to exercise my right to remain silent and to refuse to answer your questions.
I want to speak with a lawyer before answering your questions.
I would like to contact this attorney or organization:
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. I hope you do more than that.
Sources:
(1) “Under the ordinance, no village agency or employee is permitted to accept requests by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other agencies to support or assist in any capacity with immigration enforcement operations. Should an employee receive a request to support or assist in an immigration enforcement operation, the employee shall report the request to a supervisor, who will deny the request, the ordinance states.
Unless the village is presented with a valid and properly issued criminal warrant, the village is not allowed to transfer any person into ICE custody.
The ordinance also states no village employee or village agency shall assist with the “creation, publication or maintenance of any federal program to register individuals present in the United States based on their ancestry, national origin or religion.” http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/oak-park/news/ct-oak-welcoming-ordinance-tl-0209-20170207-story.html (need to disable ad blocker)
(3) http://www.teenvogue.com/story/jackie-rayos-garcia-mother-deported-guadalupe-garcia-de-rayos
(4) http://remezcla.com/culture/guadalupe-garcia-de-rayos-ice/
(5) https://www.thenation.com/article/how-us-policies-fueled-mexicos-great-migration/
