Resources

Read the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act” (S. 744):

Critical responses, statements, and analysis

  • Moratorium on Deportations Campaign Statement – “This bill continues the politics of violent exclusion that have long targeted indigenous and African American communities. It is also a pathway to an American Apartheid, as the government exerts increasing control over people of color in terms of residence, employment and daily life. It creates new mechanisms for stratifying and classifying immigrants on the basis of socioeconomic privilege and with clear racist connotations. It recreates the oppressive conditions that push people into forced migration in the first place”
  • Deferred (In)Action: Where is the Solidarity with Indigenous People facing Militarization? by Alex Soto – “First and foremost, it will direct more resources to border security. Meaning…further militarization of Indigenous communities who are divided by the so-called border, such as my home community of the Tohono O’odham Nation. Our O’odham him’dag (way of life) will once again be attacked by settler border politics, as it was in 1848 and 1852 when the so-called border was illegally imposed. Attacked like we were in 1994 when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was enacted.”
  • Comprehensive Immigration Reform is Anti-Indigenous and Anti-Immigrant by Franco Habre and Mari Garza – “Comprehensive Immigration Reform is clearly not a people’s solution.  Profiting off our demise as a gente and converting Indigenous territories to paramilitary police states is big business for government officials and corporations promoting these reforms. “

Reference Materials

Related Texts and Articles:

  • “Undocumented”: How and Identity Ended a Movement – “There are real consequences to focusing so much on the Undocumented and on simply ending the deportations of the “good immigrants: Vital resources are being funnelled towards street theatre, immigrants with impure records are constantly turned away by lawyers who simply cannot afford to take on their increasingly difficult cases because the force of the law bears down on them even harder, and an entire movement has had to shift the focus (however weak to begin with) from interrogating an exploitative system to making that exploitative system work more efficiently.
  • Let’s Talk about this “Reform” Business (1): Militarization – “The bulk of the rhetoric, and the bulk of the provisions and orientation of the bill, are around militarization, euphemistically called “security”. What is the ideological function of the emphasis on “security”? How can a militarization bill be advertised as “immigration reform” thus positioning its champions as beneficiaries of immigrant votes? Whose “security”, exactly?”
  • The Path to Il-legalization and the Invisibility of the State – ” Though the bill is touted as offering a pathway to legalization, perhaps it is more useful to read it as part of a process of illegalization — in other words, instead of assuming that some migrants are legal and some are illegal, that there is some kind of natural distinction between “authorized” presence  and unauthorized presence, we can remember that these distinctions are always created by the law and are not in themselves natural, inevitable or given.”