WHOSE FAULT IS IT?
By David Bacon
In These Times, 11/5/15
Young people in Silicon Valley, in the May Day immigrant rights march in 2013.
Undocumented Youth Are Here Through No Fault of Their
Own.
But It's Not Their Parents' Fault, Either
Using the phrase "no fault of their own" in
discussing undocumented young people does not encourage us to look at the roots
of the poverty and violence their families experience. Blaming undocumented youths' parents avoids
assigning responsibility for their displacement and migration beyond the
families themselves.
When President Obama introduced his executive order in
2012 to defer deportation for young people (Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals, or DACA), the White House website said it would "stop punishing
innocent young people brought to the country through no fault of their own by
their parents."
Last year, in the Republican assault on the President's
next order that would have extended DACA to include other family members
(Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, DAPA), Jeff Denham, a right-wing
Republican Congressman from California's San Joaquin Valley, used the same
phrase. Taking pains to explain that opposing President Obama did not mean he
supported deporting young people, he explained, "I have voted repeatedly
in Congress to protect children who were brought into this country by their
parents or guardians through no fault of their own."
The phrase "no fault of their own" sounds
sympathetic. Using it to justify halting deportations implies good intentions
towards at least some young people without papers. Yet the idea has other
troubling implications as well.
If young people came here "through no fault of their
own," then whose fault was it? Denham and Obama both say, "by their
parents [and guardians]." Mothers and fathers made the decision to cross
the border without papers. Therefore the parents are responsible for their
children's lack of legal immigration status. The fault is the parents'.
This is also the argument presented by the administration
to justify building two new detention centers in Texas to hold mothers and
children from Central America. Two summers ago the President warned parents in
Guatemala and El Salvador that they were endangering their children by bringing
them north. Don't come, he said. If you do, you will be detained and deported.
Of course, people came despite the warning. The pressures
to leave home are much more powerful than even the certain knowledge that
imprisonment in a detention center awaits them once they cross the border.
Children are not coming to the United States because they
have bad parents. They come because poverty and violence make survival
difficult and dangerous in their communities of origin. Many are joining family
members who are already here, having fled Central American civil wars or having
come to find work and establish a base for reuniting divided families.
Many of the young people who tell their stories in Dreams
Deported, a new book edited by Kent Wong and Nancy Guarneros, describe the
memory of the experience, as it is retold in their families. Vicky's family in
Mexico "was too poor to pay for her mother's medication and Vicky couldn't
find a job to support her parents." Renata Teodoro says, "My father
had been working in the United States for many years, and we survived on the
money he sent us."
The book paraphrases other accounts. "The Gonzalez
family left behind a life that Adrian does not remember. What he does remember
is that his parents came to this country with hope for economic security."
The parents of Steve Li "experienced the extreme poverty, violence and
corruption of Peru. Conditions for Steve's family went from bad to worse when
their restaurant was vandalized and their family was threatened."
The phrase "no fault of their own" does not
encourage us to look at the roots of the poverty and violence these families
experience. It especially avoids assigning responsibility for their displacement
and migration beyond the families themselves. Yet individual families together
make up huge movements of people responding to economic changes over which they
have no control.
After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
went into effect, for instance, the number of Mexican migrants in the U.S. went
from 4.5 to 12.5 million in 20 years. The new immigrants were farmers driven
off the land after being undercut by cheap U.S.-subsidized corn flooding the
Mexican market, or workers suddenly jobless after waves of privatization. Like
Renata Teodoro's father, once they arrived in the United States, they made up
the backbone workforce sustaining agriculture, meatpacking, janitorial services
and other industries, laboring at the lowest wages.
The companies that dumped the corn in Oaxaca, and those
that paid illegally low wages to Oaxacan farmers to pick strawberries in
Watsonville, certainly share some of the "fault." And they definitely
reaped most of the benefits. But when Obama and Denham say children came
through "no fault of their own," they are not pointing at the
profiteers, much less at the treaties and policies that make displacement and
exploitation possible and profitable.
In reading the testimony of the young people in Dreams
Deported, it's clear that parents had little alternative to coming north, and
bringing their children with them. Yet they are not victims. They are simply
people struggling to survive and make a place in the world for their families.
As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz says, in the context of Native American genocide in
North America, "survival is dynamic, not passive. Surviving genocide, by
whatever means, IS resistance."
DREAMERS and young immigrant rights activists in the
Oakland May Day march in 2012.
Sergio Sosa, a Guatemalan migrant who now directs Omaha's
Heartland Workers' Center, says the same thing: "Mams and
Qanjobales"-two indigenous groups in Guatemala-"face poverty and
isolation, even the possible disappearance of their identity. But they didn't
choose this fate. People from Europe and the U.S. crossed our borders to come
to Guatemala, and took over our land and economy. Migration is a form of
fighting back. Now it's our turn to cross borders."
Dreams Deported presents migrants as social actors, as
resistors rather than victims. The phrase "no fault of their own"
casts young people as innocent victims of their parents' actions. The reality
is that the young people who have built the movement of the DREAMers, fighting
for the right to go to school, for legal status and for change in immigration
policy, are anything but victims. The book recounts the family experiences of
migration, life in the U.S., and then the shock of confrontation with
immigration authorities leading to deportation. Then it tells stories of resistance,
documenting the ways young people pioneered a movement that successfully
rescued family and friends from jails and detention centers.
This is the third book in a series produced by activists
in the Dreamers movement, published by the UCLA Center for Labor Research and
Education. The first, Underground Undergrads, was published in 2008, when the
possibility of immigration reform with some degree of legalization seemed
possible to many people. It was a "coming out" moment, in which the
first of the movement's organizers sought to make visible a generation of
undocumented young people who were beginning to assert their rights. It was
followed four years later by Undocumented and Unafraid, which profiled the
growing movement in the wake of the huge effort to pass the DREAM Act. Now
Dreams Deported chronicles the difficult struggle against deportations.
First introduced in 2003, the DREAM Act would have
allowed undocumented students graduating from a U.S. high school to apply for
permanent residence if they completed two years of college or served two years
in the U.S. military. The act would have enabled an estimate 800,000-plus young
people to gain legal status and eventual citizenship. In 2010 the Act failed in
Congress, but for the seven years before that, undocumented young people
marched, sat-in, wrote letters and mastered every civil rights tactic in the
book to get their bill onto the Washington DC agenda.
Many of them gave new meaning to "coming out,"
declaring openly their lack of legal immigration status in media interviews-and
defying authorities to detain them. Three were arrested in 2010 when they
sat-in at the office of Arizona Senator John McCain, demanding that he support
the bill while defying immigration authorities to come get them. They were
arrested and held in detention overnight. The following morning a judge
recognized the obvious: These were not "aliens" who might flee if
they were released from detention, but political activists who were doing their
best not only to stay in the country, but to do so as visibly as possible.
DREAM Act campaigners did more than try to get a vote in
Washington. They used their activism to stop deportations, in an era that has
seen 400,000 people deported each year from 2009 to 2014. By stopping deportations
even in the absence of Congressional action, DREAM Activists made possible what
political insiders held to be impossible: showing that people in the streets
can change the conditions in their own communities. Congress and Washington's
political class can be forced to respond to social movements outside the
capitol.
Dreams Deported tells some of the stories of how they did
it. In San Francisco, activists won freedom for Shing Ma "Steve" Li,
a nursing student at City College of San Francisco. Immigration authorities
detained him in 2010, igniting a lightening effort to stop his deportation.
Li's parents had emigrated from China to Peru, where Li was born. They later
came to the U.S., where their petition for political asylum was denied.
That made Li an undocumented immigrant, although as he
went through San Francisco public schools, he had no knowledge of his status.
As the net of immigration enforcement was cast more widely than ever, Li and
his mother were arrested. She was bailed out of detention, but Steve Li was
shipped to a detention center in Florence, Arizona. From there he would have
been flown to Peru, where he has no relatives or family connections at all.
The case became a cause celebre for the Asian Law Caucus,
the Chinese Progressive Association and other organizations in the city's Asian
community. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the city college Board of
Trustees both passed resolutions opposing the deportation. Finally, Senator
Diane Feinstein introduced a private bill to grant Li permanent residence
status. Li was then freed by ICE, and returned to San Francisco.
For Li and his supporters, however, the private bill was
not the answer. Recalling the other young people he met in the Arizona
detention center, he said, "Their stories and faces will be with me for
the rest of my life." In his poem "Traffic Lights," he describes
the being locked up in the privately-run Florence detention center:
Today
I am
Lying
still in this cold hard bed
despised by society for trying to fit
into the mold that they wanted me to be
trapped
behind an impenetrable door
A door
without a door knob
with
dents and scratches of previous prisoners who tried to escape
A door that separates the desirables
from the undesirables
Steve Li became one of the founders of ASPIRE, a San
Francisco organization of undocumented Asian youth. Another member, Ju Hong,
spoke out during a press conference held by President Obama, in which Asian
young people were placed behind him to give a (silent) image of youthful
support for administration immigration proposals.
Hong did not remain silent, calling out to the President
to stop deportations. "There are thousands of people, undocumented
immigrants, families that are being torn apart every single day," Hong
shouted out. "Please use your executive order to halt the deportations for
all 11.5 million undocumented immigrants right now!" To his credit, the
President stopped his security detail from throwing the young people out, but
nevertheless claimed he could not act on his own. His own actions later showed
that claim to be false.
East Bay youth activists protest the incarceration of
mothers and children from Central America.
Dreams Deported recounts other examples. Undocumented
activists in the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance chained themselves
to ladders, blocking the entrance to the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention
Center. Other undocumented youth went to the U.S./Mexico border, crossed it to
meet their families, and then demanded the right to return to their homes in
the United States. Ericka Andiola, whose activism propelled her into a job in a
congressional office in Washington, D.C., used her organizing skills to pry her
mother loose from detention in Arizona.
Hareth Andrade similarly won her father's release. She
wrote a poem, "america," and read it before the national convention
of the AFL-CIO:
Let's
go and tell them,
While
they who have the power sit
Separating us as they see fit
While
my father's hands blister from work all day
and he
doesn't feel like he has a say
[In]
this nation dedicated to the proposition
that
all men are created equal
There were other victories as well. In 2010 Fredd Reyes
was picked up as he was studying for exams at Guilford Technical Community
College, and taken first to the North Georgia Detention Center, and then to the
Stewart Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Reyes' parents had fled the massacres of
Guatemala's counterinsurgency war. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan gave
guns to that country's military, which were used against indigenous communities
seeking social justice.
DREAM Act students understood why Reyes was in the
U.S.-what "through no fault of their own" meant in a Qanjobal town in
the Guatemalan highlands. They mobilized and eventually helped spring him
loose.
Jennifer Abreu came to the U.S. with her parents when she
was 13. She graduated from Lafayette High School in Lexington, Kentucky, where
she became an activist. She performed Brazilian and Colombian dances at fiestas
and dreamt of life as a journalist. After ICE picked her up, a campaign by
DREAM Act students and supporters set her free too.
Ultimately, the big achievement of the DREAMers was the
decision by President Obama to issue the DACA executive order in 2012,
deferring the deportation of young people. Many activists in the movement
credited this to a decision to sit in at his Chicago office at the height of
that year's election campaign. Yet one single action, dramatic and well-timed
as it was, would never have been powerful enough alone to win an executive
order. The deportation defense movement not only saved activists who played
important roles, but it produced the political pressure to find a way to slow
down the detention/deportation juggernaut.
That pressure did not end with DACA. By 2014, it was
powerful enough to force another executive order, DAPA, despite President
Obama's claim to Ju Hong that he couldn't act. The DREAMers' deportation
defense tactics, and their use of civil disobedience, had spread well beyond
their own ranks. In a wave of activity around the country, community and labor
activists, and deportees themselves, refused to quietly endure increased
immigration enforcement.
Hundreds of people inside the Tacoma Detention Center
launched a hunger strike against its private operator, Geo Corporation,
demanding better conditions and a moratorium on deportations. Activists, who
had held vigils outside the center for years, gathered every day to support
those inside. The strike spread to another Geo prison in Texas. According to
Maru Mora Villapando of Latino Advocacy in Tacoma, in both locations the company
isolated the strikers and in Tacoma threatened to force-feed them.
In Tucson, San Francisco, Phoenix, Chicago and other
cities, people sat down in front of ICE buses and vans, and chained themselves
to vehicles, to block deportations. In Tucson, they stopped the Operation
Streamline anti-immigrant court, which every day sentences dozens of young
border crossers, brought before a judge in chains, to months in prison.
This wave of activity not only demanded a moratorium on
deportations-it also exposed the cost of the failure of the Washington,
D.C.-based comprehensive immigration reform strategy advocated by beltway
groups. Even though Congress was paralyzed and unable to pass any legalization
program for the undocumented, the enforcement and contract labor programs
contained in the big comprehensive reform bills were implemented anyway.
The Border Patrol has grown to over 20,000 agents, and
steel walls and helicopters have transformed the U.S./Mexico border into a
heavily armed frontier. In addition to the hundreds of thousands deported every
year, untold thousands more have been fired from their jobs simply because they
lack legal immigration status. Many workers have even gone to prison because
they invented Social Security numbers in order to get a job
The U.S. now spends more money on immigration
enforcement, including the notorious Operation Streamline courts, than all
other Federal law enforcement programs combined. And while enforcement against
border crossers and the undocumented has grown exponentially, the number of
guest workers brought to the U.S. by corporations and labor contractors, at low
wages and with reduced labor rights, is also expanding. One report, Visas, Inc.
puts the annual number at 900.000.
Meanwhile, the administration insists on a new trade
treaty, the Trans Pacific Partnership (the text of which was released on
November 5), guaranteed to cause more poverty in other countries, leading to
yet more undocumented migration. Neither Congress nor the administration have
discussed this impact. That's hardly a surprise, since a debate would reveal
that NAFTA, adopted 23 years ago, led to the forced migration of 8 million
people from Mexico.
Dreams Deported focuses on the human story of the impact
of this rise in enforcement, and the way it subverts the values of working
class families, whether immigrant or native born. "We have to remember
that for every case like Steve Li's, there are hundreds of other young people
who are deported," emphasizes Alisa Messer, past president of the union at
City College of San Francisco, where Li was going to school. "These are
our students. They're doing everything we want young people to do. So we have
to fight for their right to get an education, to support their families, and to
participate in society."
Most DREAMers view their movement as part of a larger
struggle for a more basic reform of the country's immigration laws. Twelve
million undocumented people live in the U.S., and most of them work for a
living. Students not only need to stay in school, but then need the ability to
work and use their education after graduation. Their parents need the same
right, not just to pay for students' schooling, but for the survival of their
families.
The DREAMers have shown that fighting detention and
deportation is not only possible but the first step towards winning deeper
changes. As they've marched and demonstrated, they've pointed out over and over
that stopping the enforcement wave and changing immigration law are so
connected that one can't be fought without fighting for the other. In the end,
the basic requirement for both is the same: a social movement of millions of
people, willing to take to the streets and the halls of Congress.
Dreams Deported
UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education, 2015, 96pp,
$10
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