No hate, no fear, IMMIGRANTS are welcome here!

February 20, 2017 by 8 Comments

Last Friday, during a National Public Radio show’s Friday News Roundup of domestic news, four panelists briefly discussed the Day Without Immigrants actions that had taken place across the country the day before. One prominent conservative correspondent noted, “There seemed to be a little conceptual confusion over immigrants and illegal immigrants.” There was no conceptual confusion among those who protested and their supporters. They chanted, “No hate, no fear, IMMIGRANTS are welcome here!” Not “legal”, not “illegal”. Immigrants. Immigrants, children of immigrants, grandchildren of immigrants have seen how ICE agents act. They know the raids are indiscriminate, and they know the actions, and many of the actors, are compelled by a xenophobia that is informed by white supremacist racism, the intersectional form of terror of the current regime.

The Muslim Ban, the anti-immigrant raids and sweeps, the language of intimidation and threat were never about the niceties of documentation. Muslims, including non-Muslims perceived to be Muslims, saw that, at certain airports, the ban meant anyone with “a certain name or look” was subject to particularly invasive and insulting attention. In every sense, those actions were unwarranted.

Over the last week, raids have targeted people at residences, churches, homeless shelters, and courts. In El Paso, a woman filing for a protective order from an abusive partner was picked up. In Alexandria, Virginia, two men leaving a homeless shelter were taken. Across the country, people without criminal records were taken away. ICE’s response? The reports are “false, dangerous and irresponsible” and those “falsely reporting such activities are doing a disservice to those they claim to support.” Those “false reporters” include U.S. Senators and Representatives, Governors, members of the clergy, attorneys, eyewitnesses, family members, neighbors, passersby, cameras, and the list goes on. In Virginia, where I live, Governor McAuliffe, U.S. Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner have written letters to Homeland Security and still await a response.

This past weekend, new directives “dramatically expand the scope of enforcement operations”.  These “sweeping new guidelines … empower federal authorities to more aggressively detain and deport … inside the United States and at the border.” In the places where people of color live, dramatic expansion and more aggressive detention add up to a reign of terror. That terror threatens everyone. It threatens the undocumented, as it threatens tech workers, seasonal workers, students and others protected by a visa.

Immigrant of color communities know that, when it comes to people of color, those in charge don’t distinguish among the undocumented immigrant, documented immigrant, and citizen. Their response has been clear: “No hate, no fear, IMMIGRANTS are welcome here!” There is neither conceptual nor ethical nor existential confusion here: No hate, no fear, IMMIGRANTS are welcome here!

(Photo Credit: WTOP)

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Wellesley Proud: An Art Museum Without Immigrants Cannot Stand

February 18, 2017 by 1 Comment

The labels read, “Made by an immigrant”

This is a frightening time for people who care about the essential elements of a democracy: a free press, respect for fellow citizens, civil engagement with each other despite differences, to name just a few. The demonization of the other is particularly disturbing. This is also a time, however, when people of conscience make themselves known and speak up against prejudice and injustice. Which is why I was so delighted to see my alma mater, Wellesley College, highlight the substantial contributions of immigrants to the art of this diverse country. This week I proudly shared the news that the college’s Davis Museum had removed, or covered with black fabric, every piece of art created by an immigrant to the US. Why do I feel that this symbolic gesture is so powerful and why does it mean so much to me?

To call me a proud Wellesley graduate says very little about me. I am also a South African cisgender woman of color, a warrior for social justice, a progressive feminist, a writer, and a legal permanent resident of the United States. I arrived at Wellesley a feminist activist and floundered for two years as I tried to find my feet in that predominantly white, upper middle-class, wealthy milieu. I was so different from my classmates: two years older because I had taken ‘A’ levels after high school in the hope of getting into a British university; the product of a highly-politicized society and a high school with a long history of political activism (when Soweto exploded in 1976, I was in 11th grade). But, eventually, I made a place for myself. How? Because my peers embraced this person with the weird accent who looked Asian and called herself ‘Black,’ who argued that newspapers sometimes lied and often concealed, who said one should defy morally illegitimate laws, who loved the music of Janis Ian and Frank Sinatra. They listened to me, I listened to them: we found a way to be friends. We’re still talking: 37 years later a group of Wellesley ‘84s in the DMV meets regularly for dinner.

It also helped that the college was an affirming place for women and that I met faculty and staff who shared my worldview. Those professors have remained my friends. At lunch last summer I told the faculty member who influenced me most profoundly that, in my first class with her, “I felt my brain explode.” The feeling of kinship—intellectual, political, personal—was instantaneous, deep, and endures to this day. Which is why Wellesley means so much to me. She has given me so much and I feel part of her. And then, to have her embrace being home to “a bunch of dykes,” turn it around and proclaim the achievements of that same “bunch of dykes” tells me that my alma mater is still the open and inclusive environment I graduated from all those years ago. Wellesley’s visible recognition of contributions immigrants have made to art says, “This is what we lose without them here.” That is a powerful message.

 

(Photo Credit: CNN)

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A Day Without Immigrants tells me what democracy looks like

February 16, 2017 by 3 Comments

Tell me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like!

Today, in Washington and across the United States and beyond, people honored A Day Without Immigrants in various ways, some publicly and loudly, some quietly and privately. In Washington, a boisterous crowd marched and chanted for much of the afternoon, going from La Casa, a community center in the heart of the historic Salvadoran and Latinx community; to 14th and U Streets, a historic intersection of Black Liberation and Power histories and struggles; to a local Whole Foods, to engage with workers’ struggles; to the Wilson Building, which houses Washington, DC, municipal offices; to the White House. The journey from La Casa to the White House is incredibly short and impossibly long. In a few brief hours, that multigenerational, multinational moving body of moving bodies passed through and united entire centuries as well neighborhoods, continents, and populations.

While a great deal of attention has been paid on the `hospitality industry’, and particularly restaurants, in Washington, the largest private employers are universities. In many cities, universities are the largest or among the largest private and public employers. While many of on the march work in hotels, households, transportation and restaurants, there were also engineers, writers, lawyers, doctors and teachers. We came from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Mali, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Portugal, Belgium, and the United States, to name only a few. Between chants, we shared stories of our various migrations and we shared stories of our “regular”, everyday lives.

In Washington, as elsewhere, a Day Without Immigrants would close every university and college, every hospital and clinic, as well as restaurants, hotels, gas stations, grocery stores, all forms of transportation, and much more. I hope that our universities, colleges, and hospitals are as direct and courageous as many restaurant owners have been in their opposition to the criminalization and dehumanization of immigrants.

Many restaurant owners have made it clear that the dignity and safety of immigrants cannot be merely an economic argument. That our economic lives rely on immigrants is not and cannot be the point. The point is that, despite ever growing inequality, we live together, and that, living together, is what community looks like and what democracy looks like. When we join our voices, whether in the streets or in the classrooms or elsewhere, we create and we become one beautiful voice. Many languages, one beautiful voice. This is what democracy looks like.

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