Where Have All the Immigrants Gone?

Where Have All the Immigrants Gone?

By Partha Banerjee



Just two years ago, hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers, families and
their supporters flooded the streets, parks and city halls all across
America to demand a fair and comprehensive immigration reform. From Los
Angeles to New York, Dallas to Chicago, it was an historic show of faces,
faiths and festoons displaying enormous organizing skills and enviable
solidarity. In the mind-boggling diversity of human mass, a great sense of
unity percolated through the crowds’ remarkable non-violent means and strong
desire to belong to mainstream America, yearning to be accepted by this land
of free. The huge demonstrations and their many similarities to claim
equality, human rights and economic justice rekindled powerful memories of
the sixties. Grassroots activists called it a resurgent civil rights
movement.

Now two years later, however, the high tide of demonstrations that rocked
the American conscience ebbed – as if it had all happened in a fantasy. Or,
as if our political leaders finally came together and settled on a real and
meaningful reform, and pushed it in Congress to shape another landmark
American law of humanity along the line of the New Deal, Civil Rights Act or
Roe v. Wade. Unfortunately, a desperately needed Immigrant Rights and
Justice Act is still very much an illusion -- an unrealized dream.

Where have all the street marchers gone?

One of the secrets many onlookers -- either on the supporting or opposing
side of the charged issue -- perhaps didn’t know was that the mass
demonstrations of 2006 were organized largely by precariously
underresourced, no-name, local groups; the role of the big policy and
lobbying groups was only supportive, ceremonial. The Kafkesque-repressive
legislation H. R. 4437, also known as the Sensenbrenner-King bill after the
Republican congressmen who’d floated it, called for mass detention and
deportation of the twelve million-plus undocumented immigrants and their
many U.S.-born children, with no possible legal recourse. In combination
with the sinister Real ID Act the Congress had underhandedly passed in late
1995, H. R. 4437 would cause havoc to millions of poor, working-class
families. The grassroots uprising took place to challenge such a draconian
measure; the million-strong, spontaneously building marches all across
America doomed Sensenbrenner-King and its connivers. A peaceful resistance
almost entirely conceived out of kitchen table discussions, implemented
through organically grown day labor streetcorner meetings and conference
calls, and cheerled by Spanish talk radios and pro-immigrant labor unions
was born. Then, millions of workers and families braved detention and
deportation, and came out in a phenomenal unison. “Si se puede” – Yes we
can – was their clarion call.

So, whatever happened to the new movement of emancipation?

Partly inspired and partly feared by the massive show of disempowered
immigrants, Congress tried in 2006 and 2007 to strike a deal between
Democrats and Republicans to pass reform measures. Their hopes were buoyed
by the results of the 2006 elections where a number of pro-immigrant
politicians had won and far-right anti-immigrant incumbents were defeated.
Key pro-immigrant politicians such as Senators Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, John
McCain and Richard Durbin and Representatives Louis Gutierrez and Sheila
Jackson-Lee came up with various legislative proposals. However, neither the
immigrant-bashing politicians and think tanks nor the immigrant activists
and support groups were ready to accept them. The compromise bills were
blasted as amnesty by right wing Federation for American Immigration Reform,
pseudo-neutral Center for Immigration Studies and vigilante-militant
Minuteman aided by foam-in-the-mouth xenophobia from Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly
and Lou Dobbs (the latter cited bogus data linking leprosy to undocumented
immigrants); on the other hand, pro-immigrant American Friends Service
Committee, American Civil Liberties Union, and American Immigration Lawyers’
Association raised alarm about the bills’ serious constitutional breaches,
particularly in their lack of legal and workplace protection for the
arbitrarily classified, temporary "guest" workers. The Bush administration
added to the woes by not investing its will, power and resources to mend the
ideological divides or legislative loopholes. Like with other important
areas such as education, employment, health care, energy or environment, the
war-focused Republican presidency showed its incompetence to resolve the
immigration issue, and left it in limbo. Even the once-plausible DREAM Act
drafted for college-aspiring immigrant children and AgJobs designed to
promote workplace rights for immigrant farmers were pushed back into
near-oblivion.

Critically important discussions to understand the reasons behind
immigration and the present crises never took place in mass media: war and
refugee issues, global impact of NAFTA and other economic treaties the World
Bank and International Monetary Fund orchestrated rarely came up even in an
election-year discourse.

The lack of resolve in Washington did not help the immigrant workers and
families. Various state and city governments took advantage of Congress’
inaction, and passed some of the most hideous anti-immigrant laws; many saw
these laws as the powerful’s backlash against the immigrants’ political
uprising. In the first three months of 2008, state lawmakers around the
country proposed hundreds of anti-immigrant bills – mostly to gain political
mileage out of election-year sentiments and ignorance about immigrants’
rights and plights – even though experts said the cost and legal opposition
would keep many bills from becoming law.

Following Oklahoma and Colorado, two places with some of the harshest
anti-immigrant measures, lawmakers in scores of states recently sponsored
legislations that would drastically restrict undocumented immigrants’ access
to driver’s licenses and other IDs, limit public benefits, penalize
employers who employed them, and boost ties between local police departments
and federal immigration authorities. In 2007, more than 1,500 anti-immigrant
laws were proposed at state or city levels nationwide.

Federation for American Immigration Reform said about the states’ new
initiatives, “they feel like they have to take it into their own hands
because the federal government is doing nothing” -- as if the federal
government’s only role in this mess is to ensure the cruelest punitive
measures for the underprivileged and routinely exploited immigrant workers,
without whose toil and tears (and taxes too), the American economic
juggernaut would practically idle. Ironically, other than the rights and
justice groups, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Conference of State
Legislatures, and powerful mayors such as New York’s Bloomberg have
expressed their strong reservations against such severe as well as
cost-ineffective and politically motivated oppressions.

To support their local counterparts in their relentless onslaught, some
Washington insiders have also reenergized their efforts to pass new
anti-immigrant bills. Emulating H. R. 4437, North Carolina Democrat Rep.
Heath Schuler, with aid from extremist-anti-immigrant Tom Tancredo (R-CO)
has recently floated the Secure America with Verification and Enforcement
(SAVE) legislation – a bill that now has co-sponsorship of nearly forty
Democrat and twice as many Republican Congress members. Talk about
election-year politics: even yesterday's "immigrant-friendly" John McCain
and Hillary Clinton have now switched their positions on key driver’s
license and detention-deportation issues. Barack Obama has remained
ambivalent.

But it is the inhumane state and city laws that have put immigrant workers
and families on the defensive: nationwide workplace raids by Immigration and
Customs Enforcement of undocumented immigrants and certain employers have
created hysteria in the community. Infants and toddlers have been forcibly
separated by ICE from their “illegal alien” mothers; mothers have been
forcibly removed from the family, and handcuffed, detained and deported. A
silent and nearly invisible, fascistic sweep is continuing all across
America destroying dreams and aspirations of immigrant families and
children, and it’s happening in cities and towns of this country that boasts
its history and heritage of immigration and diversity. Thousands of ordinary
immigrants are being put in privately owned, dark and desolate prisons; some
border towns are now almost entirely run by prison corporations. Those
grassroots groups that just two years ago helped millions of brave men and
women to come out on the streets to show a massive strength of peace and
togetherness are now busy spending all their over-extended energy and
shoestring resources to fight back against the Orwellian onslaught.

Where have all the big-name lobbying groups -- the self-styled custodians
and media-mouthpieces for immigrant rights -- gone?

The immigrant workers and their shoestring-resourced, on-the-ground support
groups keep carrying on the crusade, challenging some of the most ruthless
repressions this country has ever seen. These “no-name” torchbearers of
human rights and justice can be found across the U.S. – in Freehold, New
Jersey; Tucson, Arizona; or Jackson, Mississippi. We can only hope their
struggle will be vindicated, just like the civil rights movement was
victorious in the sixties. At least, history is on their side.

When will the mighty people in power ever learn?


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Dr. Partha Banerjee is a New York City-based immigrant rights and peace activist.