Mediaboss Marketing

As demonization of immigrants from Latin America continues at a fever pitch, two recent analyses of U.S. border policies and their consequences could not be more timely: John Carlos Freys Sand and Blood: Americas Stealth War on the Mexico Border and Todd Millers Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World.

Like Empire of Borders, Freys Sand and Blood examines U.S.-Mexico border history by placing the present brutal treatment of undocumented migrants in the context of a long history of white supremacist U.S. politics. Frey, a veteran investigative reporter, writes in clear, down-to-earth prose about the impact that U.S. immigration and border security policies have had on Latinx migrants.

Frey himself had a traumatic childhood experience with border authorities which gave him first-hand insight into the darker side of U.S. law enforcement. He was born in Mexico but his family moved to the United States when Frey was a toddler. Since his father was a U.S. citizen, Frey became naturalized but his mother remained in this country thanks to a green card. When he was about 12, Frey was taking a walk with his mother near their home in rural San Diego and briefly separated from her. When he went looking for her his mother was gone. She had been picked up by a Border Patrol agent who targeted her because of her dark skin. Though in the U.S. legally, she had not brought her ID with her. The agent did not allow her to return home for her ID; instead he took her into custody and she was deported. [See also NACLAs review of The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez.]

Frey opens Sand and Blood by describing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, an early example anti-immigrant racism in the United States. That legislation allowed the military to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border to block Chinese workers from entering this country. By the time the Border Patrol was officially established in 1924, U.S. laws restricted entry to Asians, illiterates, prostitutes, criminals, contract laborers, unaccompanied children, idiots, epileptics, the insane, the diseased and defective, alcoholics, beggars, polygamists, anarchists, among others.

Large agricultural interests kept Mexicans from being added to that list because those big landowners needed underpaid laborers to maintain hefty profit margins. Mexican workers crossed the border regularly, sometimes daily, to toil on large farms in California, Texas, and Arizona. Though granted entry, these men and women were treated abysmally: for more than 40 years, the delousing of Mexicans crossing between Juarez and El Paso involved being sprayed with cyanogen, which is toxic to humans.

Frey describes how, in 1917, a teenager named Carmelita Torres stood up to that inhumane process by refusing to strip for the spraying ritual, then convincing 30 other women at the bridge between Juarez and El Paso to resist also. These women sparked a wave of resistance later called the bath riots, and Mexicans began avoiding the official checkpoint altogether. Authorities in El Paso responded by assigning patrols of mounted agents, precursors to the U.S. Border Patrol, to monitor unauthorized crossings.

Sand and Blood fast-forwards from that initial wave of illegal crossings to the Bracero (manual laborer in Spanish) program created by the U.S. and Mexican governments during WWII labor shortages. This program, which ran from 1942 to 1964, allowed millions of farmworkers to work in the United States. Some of the workers stayed in the United States without government permission, contributing to a much greater Latinx population in the Southwest and elsewhere. Big agribusiness was happy to continue to employ workers who overstayed the expiration of their work permits.

Frey argues that the current military enforcement of the U.S.-Mexico border can be traced to Ronald Reagans 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, under which employers of undocumented workers were fined and border security was tightened to lessen immigration flows.Unlike todays approach, however, pathways to citizenship were left flexible. Reagan stated, I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.

Such support for a path to legal permanent residency was not wildly popular among other politicians. Many focused on lawbreakers among immigrants and exploited nativist fears of illegal aliens. In his 1995 bid for reelection, Californias governor Pete Wilson turned around a losing campaign by playing on paranoia about undocumented brown people overrunning California. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton also gained political capital by sounding like a hardline Republican on immigration. While Frey notes that after the September 11, 2001 attacks George W. Bush oversaw a near doubling of the size of the Border Patrol, he writes, The blueprint for a militarized approach, one that caused massive death, began in earnest under the administration of a Democrat, Bill Clinton. Frey meticulously lays out a case that, in its messaging, the Clinton Administration perpetuated a negative, anti-immigrant stereotype that remains in the political lexicon today.

U.S. trade policies in the 1990s only exacerbated economic insecurity in Mexico, which in turn increased the influx of migrants from our Southern neighbor. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), U.S. corn flooded into Mexico, driving rural farmers from their traditional livelihoods. This and other aspects of NAFTAs pro-business economics helped increase Mexicos extreme poverty rate from 21 percent in 1994 to 37 percent in 1997. [2]

As more Mexicans decided to leave their homeland in the wake of NAFTA, the Clinton Administration responded with a policy called prevention through deterrence, which increased Border Patrol enforcement in and near El Paso, San Diego, and other urban areas. The result: Migrants began crossing in remote rural areas, and more and more died of exposure in the desert.

As part of the War on Drugs, George H.W. Bush committed to using the U.S. military to stop drug smuggling at the southern border. Frey notes that though 97 percent of cocaine and close to 100 percent of heroin and methamphetamine entered the U.S. by land or sea vehicles, inspections of such vehicles did not increase. Instead, as the 1990s went on, the military worked in tandem with the Border Patrol to target migrants on foot.

War on Terror alarmism after September 11, 2001 replaced the drug interdiction rationale for border crackdowns. Suddenly the specter of terrorist attacks from the south became a talking point for fear-mongering nativists. Congressman Silvestre Reyes, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Frey, There was no terrorist threat coming from Mexico and there never has beenPoliticians have used Mexicans and immigrants as scapegoats for so long that they believe there is a real threat so its not too far to go to turn them into real terrorists. The George W. Bush Administrations Department of Homeland Security oversaw the new agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a billion-dollar bludgeon to be wielded against undocumented immigrants. In 2003, the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was created as a sister agency to ICE. CBP, in effect the largest police force in the United States, with a budget of $13.5 billion, oversees the Border Patrol.

A Border Patrol agent told Frey, After 9/11, the gloves came off, and we were trained to see the migrants as possible terrorists. Abuse of migrants became commonplace. To quickly increase the size of the Border Patrol, the Bush administration lowered hiring standards with less thorough vetting of recruits and less training. Frey has reported on incidents of Border Patrol agents firing at and killing Mexican nationals across the border. He has spent years investigating Border Patrol killings of migrants and, after repeated information requests, received no useful feedback on those killings from the U.S. government. But despite government stonewalling, the Southern Border Communities Coalition has documented 80 cases of immigrants killed by Border Patrol agents with no guilty verdicts for agents who were responsible.

Though Barack Obama has the reputation of being more humane than his predecessor, Frey notes: Obama continued the legacy of all U.S. presidents and administrations since Ronald Reagan, making life more difficult for immigrants. In his time in office, Obama deported more than 5 million people. Obamas presidential campaigns received large contributions from defense contractors who profited greatly from border spending: Boeing, which received a billion-dollar contract for a virtual fence that failed on all counts, gave Obama around $191,000 in 2012. Lockheed Martin also gave generously.

Frey cultivated sources inside government agencies and doggedly peppered elected officials with questions mainstream media outlets tend to avoid. He also did more than spending time talking with people attempting to make it across the border: After making contact with a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa cartel who oversees a large number of highly profitable illegal crossings, Frey participated in a trek of migrants across the border. After walking all day in the blazing sun, Frey woke up with blisters on his feet, a parched throat, and little remaining water. He soon told the cartels guide that he couldnt go on. But unlike others attempting the journey, Frey had a satellite phone to call for help. As an air conditioned vehicle took him away, Frey reflected that if he had stayed in the desert, the smugglers would have left him to die.

A forensic anthropologist told Frey, Nobody cares about dead immigrants. Theyre invisible when theyre alive, and theyre even more invisible when theyre dead. No one knows how many thousands have perished while attempting to enter the US through desert terrain, and the U.S. government has little to no interest in tracking such deaths. And after members of the faith-based coalition No More Deaths placed gallon jugs of water in areas of migrant passage, Border Patrol agents were caught on camera kicking such jugs over, increasing the likelihood of yet more deaths from dehydration.

Such acts of wanton cruelty have been emblematic of the Trump presidency. His administration has systematically instituted zero tolerance policies under which young children are separated from parents without bothering to track them, children and adults die in detention camps, and asylum appeals are denied en masse.

Frey also spent time traveling with one of the Central American caravans that Trump demonized relentlessly. The large group offered safety in numbers to travelers who in isolation routinely face extortion, robbery, kidnapping, and rape while attempting to pass through Mexico. Many of the people Frey spoke to discussed leaving home because of gang violence and the grueling poverty that is endemic throughout Central America. But he also heard a climate cause rarely mentioned in U.S. media: The land itself was no longer hospitable to these poor people. A prolonged drought in the dry corridor of Central Americawhich includes parts of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaraguahad resulted in almost complete crop failure in many areas.

Journalist Todd Miller, who has been writing about U.S. border issues for more than two decades, including in his previous books Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (2017) and Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Homeland Security (2014), expands on the connections between climate change and illegal immigration. His most recent book, Empire of Borders, focuses on border enforcement and climate-related refugees. He opens by quoting a climate scientist who describes Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador as ground zero for climate change in the Americas, then looks at Washingtons world-wide heavily militarized border security apparatus.

In Storming the Wall, Miller echoes Frey when he discusses the severity of the climate crisis in Central America. Citing a 2016 report, he writes, from 1995 to 2014 Honduras was indeed ground zero, the country most impacted by severe weather. During those 19 years, Honduras endured 73 extreme weather events and an average of 302 climate-related deaths per year. But reflecting on his time talking to activists and agricultural workers in Honduras, Miller writes, From the perspective of the border enforcement regime, its immaterial whether or not there is a drought, whether or not there is a harvest, or whether or not there is sufficient food. Droughts do not matter. Persistent storms do not matter. To the on-the-ground immigration authorities, when it comes to interdiction, incarceration, and deportation, it means nothing that a new era of climate instability has begun. All that matters is whether or not a person has the proper documents.

Though the current occupant of the White House claims to not believe in climate change, the U.S. military has for years been making contingency plans for its future effects on immigration. In 2015, a U.S. Brigadier General told Miller, As it gets hotter, as the catastrophic events become more frequent, its having an impact on how they grow their agriculture in the Latin American countries, and employment is becoming a problem, and its driving people up north. U.S. military planning for wide-scale flight from climate changes includes the equivalent of war games. This is a continuation of policy leanings going back more than 20 years: In 1994, Secretary of State Madeline Albright said, We believe that environmental degradation is not simply an irritation but a real threat to our national security. This threat involves an enormous amount of people who will need new places to live: the numbers who will be fleeing extreme weather in their home countries is staggering, with estimates that go as high as one billion by 2050.

In Empire of Borders, Miller encounters soldiers familiar with BORTAC, the little-known special forces and tactical unit of the U.S. Border Patrol, at the border between Guatemala and Honduras. BORTAC, which Miller describes as Border Patrol robocops, has had a global presence in the Americas and the Caribbean, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ukraine, Kosovo, and Tajikistan. The U.S. influence on global border construction and enforcement is staggering. Miller writes, Close your eyes and point to any land mass on a world map, and your finger will probably find a country that is building up its borders in some way with Washingtons assistance.

Millers analysis of the history of punitive measures on the U.S.-Mexico border dovetails with Freys. Clearly Donald Trumps brutally sadistic policies built on and worsened already existing policies from Obamas presidency. Miller cites a 2011 report that details the permanent separation of 5,100 children from their families. He makes a convincing case that the roots of such racist policies go back to the creation of the U.S.-Mexico borderthe result of a bloody war of conquest in which the U.S. seized land that today makes up much of Southern California and the southwestern states.

But it is not just at Mexicos northern border that the United States maintains a heavily militarized presence. The American Civil Liberties Union calls the 100-mile zones around both the southern and northern borders Constitution-free zone(s). Miller spoke to a CBP official who pointed out that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to the Department of Homeland Security, which CBP is part of. CBP and DHS are also exempt from restrictions on racial profiling that apply to other branches of the U.S. government.

Millers travels to global hot spots where CBP has a profound influence leads him to quote a journalist who calls the organization global capitalisms bouncers. He also cites anthropologist Jeff Halper, who argues that global border enforcement promotes a certain social order while also ensuring the smooth flow of capital.

Miller talks to activists from different countries who argue for military-free open borders. Despite the global siege mentality, he documents so effectively in Empire of Borders, Miller sees the possibility of radically more humane arrangements than the current state of affairs. Miller notes, Leaders talk of border security as if it were as natural and timeless as a mountain or a river. It is not. The hardened militarized borders insisted upon by politicians are a recent phenomenon, as are political boundaries between nation-states, as are nation-states themselves.

Against this backdrop, I found Millers optimism about the possibilities of a shift toward global solidarity and empathy beyond the confines of nation state provincialism the least convincing part of Empire of Borders. The lack of compassion for others in the right-wing, anti-immigrant regimes now in power in the United States and elsewhere dont seem likely to make a leftward shift toward open borders any time soon. As Miller notes elsewhere in this excellent book, In the climate era, coexisting worlds of luxury living and impoverished desperation will only be magnified and compounded.

The reality of millions driven from their homes is not some dystopian future scenario: The UN High Commissioner on Refugees reported in 2015 that their were more than 65 million forcibly displaced people in the world. That number does not include migrants forced to move by global poverty.

Although the powerful countries most responsible for our climate crisis show little interest in becoming more welcoming to climate refugees, the more positive possibilities that Miller points to are worth fighting for. To mangle a riff from the great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, no matter how much pessimism dominates our intellects, optimism of the will still has a chance to prevail.

Ben Terrall is a San Francisco-based writer whose work has appeared in CounterPunch, In These Times, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Noir City, January Magazine, and other outlets.

Disclaimer: Todd Miller is a member of NACLAs Editorial Board.

Continued here:
The Deadly Reverberations of U.S. Border Policy (Review) - NACLA

Not many peoplebesides immigration law wonks had probably heard of Section 1325, before Julin Castro called for repealing it during the first Democratic presidential primary debate this summer. The law in question makes it a federal crime to enter the U.S. without permission turning an immigration offense into a criminal one. President Donald Trump used a policy of zero tolerance for breaking that law to justify separating families at the border, but under George W. Bush and Barack Obama before him, 1325, along withillegal reentry coming back after being deported was already being used to jail and deport more and more immigrants. In fact, immigration-related crimesnow make up the majority of all federal criminal prosecutions.

Castros proposal to repeal 1325 might have seemed to come out of left field, but its the exercise of the law that is historically the outlier: While laws criminalizing entry have existed since 1929, they were largely ignored for a century, the lawyer and scholar Csar Cuauhtmoc Garca Hernndez reminds us in a new book, Migrating to Prison: Americas Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants. In 1975, he noted a mere 575 people were charged with an immigration crime; in 1993, only 2,487. Contrast that with fiscal year 2018, when prosecutors brought 105,692 federal immigration charges.

Image: Courtesy of The New Press

The criminalization of immigration, especially the scale at which it happens now, is a relatively recent trend, Hernndez argues. And it ought to be reversed. His book joins a number of recent works that put contemporary immigration politics in the same light that scholars and activists have shone on mass incarceration showing it to be a phenomenon inextricably linked to the history of land, race, and capitalism in the United States. The immigration prison is a reminder that human bondage based on racial and economic markers of undesirability cant be relegated to some distant past, Hernndez writes. If were willing to lock people up, well find a reason. Most of the time the targets will be people of color. We can call this coincidence, but we would be lying to ourselves.

Hernndez lays out in a lucid, linear fashion the evolution of immigration law and its enforcement in the United States, from laws restricting the movement of certain people across state lines formerly enslaved people, for instance to the Chinese ExclusionAct of 1882, the first in a series of acts that barred Asian immigrants for decades.

Any history of how the notion of illegality in migration took root has to consider the experience of Mexicans. While the first U.S. immigration laws focused with explicit racism on excluding Asians, Mexicans were the ones often physically targeted by Border Patrol harassed, removed, or allowed to pass to satisfy the desires of powerful Southwest planters. In Hernndezs words, Border Patrol detained and deported their way to a scared workforce. Many of those workers, whether unauthorized or sanctioned under the bracero program, which ran from 1942 to 1964, were rendered illegal by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which got rid of national quotas and more or less established the United States current immigration regime, wherein countries are allotted a certain number of visas. Though ostensibly a progressive measure doing away with the racist quotas and nationality bans of previous eras, when it came to Mexico, the act, also known as Hart-Celler, ignored thecloseness ofthe nations and subjected Mexicans to a national cap nowhere near high enough to accommodate traditional migration levels. Perversely, the Hart-Celler Acts formal equality turned immigration law against Mexican migrants, Hernndez writes. Mexicans became illegal, and illegal aliens became racially coded as Mexican.

Its focus on detention sets Hernndezs book apart from other recent histories of immigration and the border, including Kelly Lytle Hernndezs history of the Border Patrol;Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration, by Ana Raquel Minian; and Greg Grandins The End of Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. Early immigration prisons were atrocious dockside facilities, like a two-story wooden shed on the San Francisco wharf run by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, where Chinese migrants waited to be approved entry by U.S. officials. Ironically, it was to address these terrible conditions in company-run centers that the federal government got involved, creating facilities like Ellis Island in the New York Harbor, which opened in 1892, and Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay. For the first time, Congress required inspection officers to detain anyone not clearly and beyond doubt entitled to admission, Csar Cuauhtmoc Garca Hernndez writes inMigrating to Prison. In 1896, the Supreme Court emphatically declared that immigration imprisonment was constitutionally permissible.

Yet it was a relatively brief experiment. By 1954, under Dwight D. Eisenhower, Immigration and Naturalization Service (the precursor to todays immigration agencies) had all but abandoned its detention policy. Ellis Island shut down with little fanfare. Hernndez concludes that, in fact if not in law, the United States came remarkably close to abolishing immigration imprisonment. While that was, in the words of the attorney general at the time, a step in the direction of humane administration of the immigration laws, it was also self-interested, Hernndez notes. Immigration prisons were costly, and, as has been the case throughout U.S. history, businesses wanted migrants out of prison so they could be used as cheap labor.

A group of Chinese and Japanese women and children wait to be processed in a wire mesh enclosure at the Angel Island Internment barracks in San Francisco Bay in the late 1920s. The Angel Island Immigration Station processed one million immigrants from 1910 to 1940, mostly from China and Japan.

Photo: AP

Again, Hernndez connects this history to that of incarceration writ large in the U.S.There was a timewhen, even within Richard Nixons Justice Department, the utility of prison was questioned. Butthe 70s ushered ina politically orchestrated crime panic, and the war on drugs, which led to mandatory minimum prison terms and sentencing disparities for powder cocaine and crack.A parallel process played out with immigration. Migrants, like black Americans, were linked to drugs, crime, and unrest, and portrayed as leeches on government services.

In the 1980s and 90s, legislation introduced new levels of criminality for immigrants, which in turn expanded the population of imprisoned people. As Hernndez writes, Congress denied immigration judges the discretion to release anyone convicted of an aggravated felony, which includes serious offenses like murder but also shoplifting and tax fraud. Detention and deportation, once decided with considerable discretion, became mandatory for all sorts of offenses. The link between mass incarceration and immigrant incarceration is clear in the legislative history: The same 1986 law that created mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine created detainers, requests to local police to hold someone in jail until they can be picked up by immigration. Liberals were complicit too. As Grandin notes, Bill Clinton played a key role, signing a number of extremely punitive crime, terrorism, and immigration bills into law, which created the deportation regime that exists today.

Muslims and other immigrants from majority-Muslim countries suffered the racist expansion of immigration detention after September 11, 2001, as counterterrorism envelopedimmigration into the ballooning national security apparatus. And, as with the incarceration of U.S. citizens, black migrants have been disproportionately impacted by the shift to crimmigration, as scholars call it more likely to be detained for a crime, and more likely to be removed.

Considering the recent explosion in immigration detention, Hernndez explores federal contracts with local law enforcement and private prison companies. He looks not just at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement but also the U.S. Marshals Service, which holds some 60,000 people a day in pre-trial detention, making deals with state and local jails around the country (the deaths of immigrants in Marshals custody were recently investigated by Seth Freed Wessler for Mother Jones). Again, the degree to which immigration offenses dominate the criminal justice system is stark in 2013, marshals detained 97,982 people on immigration crimes, compared with 28,323 drug defendants. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, under the Department of Health and Human Services, had 49,000 children in custody in 2018, in shelters that range in comforts offered but which are all tightly controlled. Whatever agency officially holds them, Hernndez argues, to the migrants who are under constant surveillance and whose liberty has been denied there is little difference.

Detention is also used with the idea that it will dissuade people from coming. Although Hernndez points out this is legally suspect detention of asylum-seekers and people accused of other non-criminal immigration offenses is not supposed to be a punishment multiple administrations have invoked deterrence as a reason to keep people locked up.

U.S. Border Patrol agents detainpeople caught near a section of privately built border wall under construction on Dec. 11, 2019, near Mission, Texas.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Trying to separate immigrants who deserve imprisonment and those who dont, distinguishing between shelters and detention centers and jails, obscures the workings of the whole system, Hernndez says, which is designed to punish people for nothing more than being born in the wrong place. Migrants are expected to live out the exceptionalism that U.S. citizens imagine in themselves, he writes. The legal immigration system rewards wealth, education, and family connections, while the immigration enforcement system has no tolerance for human error.

Daniel Denvirs forthcoming book, All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It, complements Hernndezs by focusing on political history. He, too, traces the development of anti-immigrant sentiments and policies alongside anti-black ones, arguing that resistance to desegregation, a white identity politics of racial grievance, mass incarceration, the war on terror: all were dedicated to a quixotic mission to keep dangerous others from crossing U.S. borders and to restrict the free movement of those inside them.

Democrats likewise fell into the trap of demonizing illegal immigrants and criminal aliens, believing that by doing so they could protect legal immigration from hard-right restrictionists and defend themselves from soft-on-crime accusations (just as theyd attempted to do by jumping on the war-on-drugs bandwagon).

Image: Courtesy of Verso Books

The bipartisan embrace of immigration enforcement, Denvir argues, was the product of the elusive quest for so-called comprehensive immigration reform, which would combine a path to legalization for people already in the country with the liberalization of legal immigration goals sought by immigrant rights groups and big business alike. In order to get it, Democrats andsome Republicans, from Clinton through Bush and Obama, tried to appease nativists with promises of border security, miles of fencing, massive increases in the Border Patrol, and surveillance systems befitting a war zone. Each time, however, the nativists were not, in fact, appeased, crying amnesty and sabotaging the prospect of reform. The long-term advantage, of focusing on enforcement, Denvir writes, would accrue to the Right, which was better positioned to link the immigrant threat to crime, welfare, black people and terrorism. Trumps attempt to demand funding for his pet wall in order to save the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program last year, was a repeat of the same pattern. In the end, Trump plowed ahead with construction (literally, through delicate desert ecosystems), and DACAs fate remains unsettled.

Over time, the left flank of immigration activism has grown wary of both comprehensive immigration reform (finding those reforms incremental) and the attempt to distinguish good immigrants from bad ones. As Denvir notes, lots of good immigrants were being deported too. And how bad were the bad ones, given the vast number of individuals convicted of crimes in the carceral state?

Hernndez ends his book with the case for abolishing immigration detention, while admitting that few people have a specific vision for how to do it. Denvir ends with an analysis of an electorate that might be willing to try. As he puts it, record deportations and a radicalizing racist right has triggered a revolt among the Democratic Partys increasingly young and diverse base, and Democrats under Trump have become staunchly pro-immigrant and more hostile to enforcement. Hernndez also decides to see Trumps hostility to immigrants not just as horror but also as opportunity. Has the bipartisan consensus of immigration is a problem that needs fixing finally broken? Will Trumps nativist wish list of anti-immigrant, anti-refugee policies permanently shift Democrats away from their position that enforcement is always necessary?

Decriminalization of entry and reentry is a start, as Denvir and Hernndez advocate (among the remaining Democratic presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and Andrew Yang have said they agree). Denvir also calls for downsizing the Border Patrol, destroying existing physical barriers, breaking up agreements between ICE and local law enforcement, and increasing opportunities for legal immigration, especially from Central America and Mexico. Hernndez urges, on a personal and institutional level, divestment from private prison companies. Eliminating cash bailand giving every migrant the right to a lawyer would drastically increase their odds of success, as would case management offering help with housing and legal assistance.

These types of measures might actually lead to better compliance with immigration law, satisfying the obsession with people migrating the right way. But they would not offer concessions to a nativist right that wants any and all nonwhite immigration restricted, and they would have to resist the scare tactics bent on tying immigrants to crime and the rhetoric of scarcity that will inevitably accompany an economic downturn and worsening climate conditions. The court cases challenging the most horrendous aspects of confinement in immigrant detention centers are important. But if radical changes come, Hernndez writes, it wont be because the law demands it. It will be because people demand it.

See the rest here:
Can Immigration Detention Be Abolished? - The Intercept

Congressman Fred Upton is hoping legislation intended to ease the labor shortage faced by farmers each year could eventually lead to immigration reform. He tells WSJM News the House this month passed his Farm Workforce Modernization Act. It establishes a program that enables migrant farm workers to get legal status in the U.S. if they commit to five years of farm work and pass background checks.

And if they complete that five years, theyre able to go and become a citizen, they go to the end of the line, but thats an option for them if they choose later on, Upton said.

Upton says migrant workers are desperately needed by farmers.

A good number of our growers have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars almost every growing season because they did not have the workforce, the migrant labor that we need.

Upton says he hears from southwest Michigan farmers all of the time about the issue. He tells us the large approval margin received by the legislation in the House could hopefully get it some attention in the Senate, leading to final passage.

See the rest here:
Legislation Would Create Incentive For Migrant Farm Workers - News/Talk 94.9 WSJM

Teenager Greta Thunberg and countless other Gen-Zers are leading the way in the causes they care about.

Hundreds of people, mainly students, attend the speech by the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg ... [+] during the ''Friday for the future'' event against climate change, in Piazza Castello on December 13 in Turin, Italy. (Photo by Massimiliano Ferraro/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

They may be kids, but Generation-Z is rocking the world with their activism around gun control, immigration reform, and other causes. Now, 16-year-oldGreta Thunberg of Sweden is the youngest individual ever named Times 2019 Person of the Yearan earthshaking nod to her worldwide climate-change youth movement.

With a do-or-die dedication to her mission, Thunberg is not aloneamong her generation. She hasinspired hundreds of thousands of young people toparticipate in climate strikes, demonstrably influencingworld leaderslike noone before themin their call for transformative and urgent change.

Whether you support Thunbergs views and tactics or not, theres nodenying that she and her Gen-Z peersare a force to be reckoned with. Theyrenottryingto change the world; theyrealready doing it and, inmany cases, theyre leading the way. Here arethree key reasons why.

Bottom line: dont underestimate Generation-Z and the passionate commitment they bring to the problems our world faces. They are prepared to stand up for what they believe in, regardless of the cost. And meeting these global-scale challenges head on, as Thunberg and her generation are already doing, will call out every ounce of their tremendous potential.

Originally posted here:
Gen Z Is Already Changing The World. Just Ask Times 2019 Person Of The Year - Forbes

We cant reckon with the extreme inequalities and inherent injustices of immigration policy without an analysis of how borders, the state and capitalism function to create them.

Current liberal immigration news is often centered on reducing current harm resisting Trumps border wall and expansion of concentration camps, advocating for immigration reform and countering attacks on the asylum process. All of these efforts are critical to preventing more unnecessary death and suffering and should not be dismissed. We need more of them.

However, if we truly want to live in a world that is equal, just and inclusive to all, a more honest conversation is required about the politics of borders and migration.

Get the news you want, delivered to your inbox every day.

In order to understand immigration policy, it is important to acknowledge that we live in a world of global apartheid propped up by borders and nation states that exist to protect capital and territory, and restrict mobility. Border militarization is necessary in global capitalism in order to maintain a system of resource and labor exploitation that persists among nations, particularly in the NorthSouth Divide.

Nandita Sharma a professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii in Mnoa and an activist in feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and the autonomous worldwide No Borders movement told Truthout: Every immigration policy is designed to exclude. You can fine-tune it but at the end of the day, who are we to decide who gets to move and who doesnt get to move who gets to live and who gets to die?

Immigration policies will never be just or fair. Lets break it down.

For almost a century after the Declaration of Independence was signed, the United States had open borders. Restrictive immigration laws did not exist in the U.S. until 1875 when the Page Act was signed, which primarily targeted unfree Chinese laborers, or coolies, and women brought for lewd and immoral purposes.

The Page Act was a precursor to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which dramatically shifted immigration policy and laid the foundation for more restrictive mobility laws, and the U.S. grew into the contemporary nation state we know today.

There is a debate on what is meant by the nation state and when it emerged historically, but all states want to control peoples mobility, Sharma told Truthout. Nation states control mobility by preventing people from entering. They tend to be less concerned with people leaving.

The border controls migration materially and in our mind. It exists in one place and yet, the border is everywhere and is constantly shifting, said Marisa Holmes an activist filmmaker, graduate student at Rutgers University, and organizer with the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council (MACC) in New York City in an interview with Truthout. In other words, the border is pervasive, making its way into everyday life even well within the confines of the country: It exists at Border Patrol checkpoints, as agents on New York busses, ICE raids in Mississippi, migrant detention facilities in Philadelphia.

Alejandra Pablos an immigrant rights and reproductive justice organizer and a member of the migrant justice group Mijente told Truthout that in Arizona, its super militarized.

Theres always police, added Pablos, who has been in deportation proceedings since 2011. Theres always check points. Theres always soldiers.

With her Mexican passport, a paper that lets you cross borders, Pablos said she can travel easily into Mexico from Arizona, but she can just never come back again to this side of the wall.

According to Roberto Lovato, a writer and journalist working out of the San Francisco Writers Grotto who has worked or reported on Central American refugee issues for almost 30 years, the border is an illusion, a deadly, murderous, memory-destroying thing.

To create a border, states have to destroy the memory of what came before it.

Many of the memories destroyed by borders have to do with connection. Borders separate and rank people, helping to create and solidify hierarchies of identity. The creation of identities is woven into the fabric of national laws and ideology, and those laws and ideologies reinforce which identities belong (white, male, heterosexual, Christian), and which do not.

Nationalism is an ideology that legitimizes the idea of the nation and organizes a political community on that basis, said Sharma.

Whiteness is a sociopolitical construct, an American lie, as James Baldwin called it, that was created because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation.

It is in The Naturalization Act of 1790, which stated that any alien, being a free white person, could apply for citizenship as long as they lived in the U.S. for two years and in the state where they filed for at least one year.

Whiteness has evolved in the U.S. over time and is inextricably attached to power and labor. It was essentially an adjective for the ruling class, said Sharma.

Whiteness, nationalism and immigration controls are systems of exclusion and hierarchy that the ruling class uses to maintain power. Solidarity among workers is fractured both within the state and across borders, as people imagine themselves to be divided by races and nations.

It is a strategy to dupe this part of the working class into thinking they were something other than working class people, Sharma added. That portion [which] imagines themselves as white continually falls for it over and over again.

Leftist migration scholars and activists point to two common misconceptions of the border. The first is that a wall, borders, or even the entire Department of Homeland Security can stop people from migrating when they need to move. All evidence and studies on this show that tougher immigration policies do not deter people from migrating.

The second, perhaps bigger fallacy according to Sharma, is believing that immigration controls are meant to stop people from entering. Theyre designed to weaken them once they get in, said Sharma. The whole system from start to finish is one that makes money off of all of this misery.

Billions have been spent on border enforcement, migrant detention and surveillance. From detention camp contractors like CoreCivic and the GEO Group to tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Dell, and data-mining companies such as Palantir, who all contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to the staffing of nearly 20,000 Border Patrol agents whose salaries start just above $55,000, to the private prison firms who lobby Republicans, the list of who profits from migration policing and surveillance goes on and on.

For Pablos, borders and capitalism go hand in hand. Were reproducing global mass displacement through our capitalism, said Pablos, who spoke about how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) fueled migration. Meanwhile, the criminalization of migrants ensures that at the same time, capitalism thrives.

Capitalists also profit off of those who make it across the border. When you have 11 million people with no legal status, who risked their lives to get here, who spent their life savings or went into debt in the process, you create a labor pool that is vulnerable, cheap and exploitable.

Trump himself has historically benefitted from undocumented labor and even admitted this is a common hiring practice among employers as a way that people did business.

A cutoff of undocumented labor could well cause a recession and lead the economy to contract.

Entire sectors of the American economy would effectively cease to exist were it not for undocumented immigrants, Sharma said.

Transcending borders and nation states is a revolutionary project. The institutions that sustain them will not be taken down by politicians in our current political system, no matter how progressive that person may be, although the most left candidate might create the political conditions to expand our horizons in terms of challenging borders, according to Sharma.

Like any revolutions in our past, dismantling these systems would require massive mobilization, direct action, organizing, political education, and drastic shifts in consciousness across all borders.

When I talk about abolition, Im talking a lot about creation, Pablos said. Organizers like myself do have that new vision, and were ready to have these conversations. And again, if people created the structures, we can create new things. We can create new values, new principles.

Note: Both Roberto Lovato and Nandita Sharma have books that will be released in 2020. Lovatos reported memoir about the Salvadoran diaspora will be released in the fall. Sharmas Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants will be released by Duke University Press in February.

This story was produced with support from the Freedomways Reporting Project, a fellowship program for journalists in the U.S. South whose reporting advances justice.

Read the original:
We Can't Obtain Immigration Justice in a World of Borders and Nations - Truthout