Just how do we become the change we seek?

“We will not comply! We will not comply!” filled the air in downtown Phoenix on Thursday, July 29th – the day that Arizona’s harshly anti-immigrant bill SB 1070 went into effect. I was co-leading a BorderLinks delegation of faith leaders from across the U.S. who came to be in solidarity against SB 1070. We watched as small groups of people were arrested in an effort to take a public stand against the law. A few hundred people took over one city block downtown to raise their voices in protest; police in full riot gear worked their way into the middle of the crowd and gradually separated them until all protestors were pushed back onto the sidewalks. On one side of the police unit was a crowd of people yelling, “Cops and the Klan go hand in hand!” while on the other side a line of Unitarians spanned the crosswalk sporting their yellow “Standing on the Side of Love” t-shirts. The tension in the air was as tangible as the humidity.

Back in Tucson that afternoon, we joined with a crowd of people who had taken over the intersection between the State Building and the Federal Courthouse. I recognized many faces in the crowd, for this is a community that has mobilized frequently in recent months in response to the constant public attacks on immigrants. In March we organized in response to an ICE raid that shut down the Southside, where many immigrant families live. In May over 7,000 people hit the streets of Tucson for a May Day March in support of just immigration policies. We’ve seen youth leading the actions in protest of SB 1070 and HB 2281 (which bans ethnic studies programs in public schools). The voices of Arizona communities are rising in incredibly powerful ways against the strong tide of racist fears and nativism that have become the public face of Arizona.

Several young adults held signs proclaiming, “Undocumented and Unafraid”, and my stomach churned when I saw them. They may not be afraid, but I am. What if they really are undocumented and they get arrested? Will they be deported, or can they fight for their cases in court? What abuses will they suffer in the process? Do they know anyone in Mexico, and do they even speak Spanish? If they want to return to the U.S., will they cross the deadly Sonoran desert to reunite with their families? It hurts me to even imagine being forcibly separated from my family, and I know people in Tucson who live in daily fear of that happening to them. God of justice and love, we are lost in the wilderness! What have we become, that we ignore hundreds of deaths in the desert every year while our media plays on popular fears about immigrants? What have we become, that we would dehumanize people in the name of upholding bad laws? That we ignore our own complicity in the drug trade, migration, global economics, and the separation of families?

The interaction between protestors and police was relatively calmer in Tucson than in Phoenix, but it was clear in both cities that not everyone agrees on tactics or messaging. While some see the police as enemies, others see them as potential allies. Some want to talk about racism, others want to avoid that word altogether. There is no single, clear path for reaching the transformation we seek. I’ve been struggling with this question a lot recently: Should we push for smaller goals that may seem more practical and attainable, or is that compromising too much? Should we hold out for our ideals, or is that so unrealistic that it prevents any change from happening at all? Let me give you a concrete example: there’s been much debate about the border wall and border security. Some pro-immigrant groups attempt to build alliances by saying “Of course we all want to secure the border. We can all agree that we don’t want open borders.” For border communities, border security has come to mean militarization, destruction of fragile ecosystems, alienation of communities from each other, and human deaths in the desert. The border is much more nuanced than simply “open” or “closed”, and the phrase “border security” doesn’t fully communicate what happens down here on la frontera. Another example: should we be talking about NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) reform on a national level, or focusing only on reforming our immigration policies? I believe that large-scale immigration will continue as long as we fail to address how international agreements and business practices destabilize local economies and force people to leave their home communities. But some would say that talking about NAFTA reform is too big and controversial, and won’t ultimately get us anywhere.

Conflicts over how to push forward and what to push for have already been dividing our movements for immigrant justice, and part of me fears that we’ll never get it together enough to get something done. The other part of me is humbled by the multiplicity of people who are passionately working to transform the U.S.’s policies, public messages, and social assumptions about immigration. I live in this tension between differing approaches to the task before us, and here on the border we both struggle with and celebrate each other’s perspectives. I place my hope in a people who can come to recognize where our shared values meet, who continue being passionate without denying the humanity of others, who see the ripple effects of decisions we make today. I place my hope in a God who is in the midst of all this muck and chaos and beauty that we’re living in. Gracias a Dios que la lucha sigue!

Margi Ault-Duell works as a Program Organizer for BorderLinks in Tucson, AZ. Her work focuses on educating people from across the nation about the U.S.-Mexico border, the causes and effects of immigration, and the ways that power, privilege, and oppression weave throughout our lives. She's a United Methodist young adult and recent graduate from Drew Theologial School.

Arizona SB1070 Update

Greetings OnFire bloggers and readers. Tomorrow, anti-immigrant law SB1070 was supposed to go into effect. This is an update from the Associated Press.

Good news from Arizona:

Judge blocks parts of Arizona immigration law

By JACQUES BILLEAUD and AMANDA MYERS (AP)

PHOENIX — A judge has blocked the most controversial sections of Arizona's new immigration law from taking effect Thursday, handing a major legal victory to opponents of the crackdown.

The law will still take effect Thursday, but without many of the provisions that angered opponents — including sections that required officers to check a person's immigration status while enforcing other laws. The judge also put on hold a part of the law that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times, and made it illegal for undocumented workers to solicit employment in public places.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton put those controversial sections on hold until the courts resolve the issues.

Opponents say the law will lead to racial profiling and is trumped by federal immigration law.

But in celebrating this federal court ruling, let us not forget that this bill's existence is just another example of institutional racism that contributes to the culture of fear that is a daily reality for so many immigrant communities. Let us continue to pray and stand in solidarity with those fighting against SB1070 and those who continue to push for comprehensive immigration reform.

To learn more about what parts of SB1070 will still go into effect tomorrow and what has been blocked, check out an article from the Arizona Daily Star here.

Kneeling in Altar

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel

Rock me mama anyway you feel
Hey mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a south-bound train
Hey mama rock me
-"Wagon Wheel," Bob Dylan; Old Crow Medicine Show

The border, la frontera, is death. Again and again when I was in Nogales I heard this expressed by people who call the border home, people whose existence is this increasingly militarized space. Again and again, I saw white crosses, x's that marked the spot, signifying the death in the desert along that line drawn in pencil by men far, far away.

There is a dusty fear here. As a member of the OnFire Borderlinks delegation in October 2009, we traveled from Tucson to Nogales to Altar and back. These memories hit me this week as I sat in front of a computer working at Faith in Public Life when I came across this article by Elliot Spagat from the Associated Press:

Mexican drug cartel killings near Nogales increase

ALTAR, Sonora- Very few residents dare to drive on one of the roads out of this watering hole for migrants, fearing they will be stopped at gunpoint. They worry they will be told to turn around after their gas tanks are drained or, worse, be kidnapped or killed.

A shootout that left 21 people dead and six wounded on the road last week is the most gruesome sign that a relatively tranquil pocket of northern Mexico quickly is turning into a hotbed of drug-fueled violence on Arizona's doorstep...

Nogales, the main city in the region, which shares a border with the Arizona city of the same name, has had 131 murders so far this year, nearly surpassing 135 for all of 2009, according to a tally by the newspaper Diario de Sonora. That includes two heads found Thursday stuffed side-by-side between the bars of a cemetery fence.

The carnage still pales compared with other Mexican border cities, most notably Juarez, which lies across from El Paso, which had 2,600 murders last year. But the increase shows that some small cattle-grazing towns near Nogales are in the grip of drug traffickers who terrorize residents...

"If no one puts a stop to this, these will become ghost towns," said Jose Martin Mayoral, editor of Diario del Desierto, the newspaper in Caborca....

That phrase ghost towns echoes in my mind as I sit here, so far from this fear on the border yet still so affected by it. When I sat down to write this post, I thought about what it was like to sit in a van in Altar looking out into the desert at the road people took to get to the U.S.A. without documents. We couldn't get out of the van because the entrance to the road was patrolled by gangs. I wanted to write about NAFTA and the failed war on drugs, corruption and USAmerican citizens' own complicity with the violence that is migrating over this border in the way people are forced into drug and human trafficking. I wanted to compare the low levels of violent crime in USAmerican Border cities with the fact that Ciudad Juarez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas, is one of the most violent cities in the world.

Yet as I read this Associated Press article and think about what Altar and Nogales meant to me and why I am so saddened to read about the violence on the border, the image that keeps coming into my head is that of José, an eighteen year old who looked so much younger who came to the migrant shelter in Altar the night we were there. He was alone. I didn't get much of his story and don't know if any one of us did, but what I remember about José was the quiet way he sang along to the music as my friend David played guitar in the courtyard to the shelter. We sang song after song as the sun set and the coolness of the desert at night set in around us.

The sacred to me was in the movement of José's lips as we sang "Wagon Wheel" until the haunting beauty of the song dissipated in the darkness and we entered the shelter to eat.

As I continue to sit in front of a computer, I meditate on the movement of God in that moment and I just wish I could give it to you, the way the night air felt against my skin, the sound of Susanna's voice as she led us all in the song, the weight of it all. Would it change you, would it make you ask more questions, make you stop and think when you read about the increased violence of border cities on the Mexican side of the border?

"Wagon Wheel" is a song about traveling south, about getting to Raleigh to be with a lover, where if he died in Raleigh, he says "at least I will die free." I don't know if José ever made it north, but if he did, he only had a few months before SB1070 reminded the rest of us how undocumented people living in this country are not free, continuing to live in prisons of fear from a different violence. José reminds me why we need comprehensive immigration reform so badly, why I pray he is neither living in the border cities in Mexico nor in Arizona but that he has a chance to live free of that fear. That we all have the chance to live free of that fear.



***

All the pictures are from the OnFire Borderlinks delegation in October 2009. Check out the posts about our trip from David, me, Mallory, Lindsey, and Jen.

From Arizona to Palestine/Israel: Documentation, Deportation, and Boycott”

This blog was originally posted at OnFire member David Hosey's City of...blog.

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

A new order allows enforcement officials to stop anyone who “looks illegal” (read: has brown skin) and demand that they produce documents proving their right to be in a place they call home. Failure to produce such documents can lead to fines, jail time, or deportation. Widely seen as a violation of basic rights, this new order leads to widespread calls for boycott.

I’m speaking, of course, about Arizona’s new racist law, SB1070–but I could just as easily be talking about Palestine/Israel.

If you haven’t heard, SB1070 effectively mandates racial profiling by giving local police officers the right to demand immigration documentation from anyone they think might be in the country without documents. Here’s theWashington Post summarizing the new law (and insisting on calling human beings “illegal”):

“The law gives local police broad authority to stop and request documents from anyone they reasonably suspect is an illegal immigrant. It calls for aggressive prosecution of illegal immigrants, and officers can be sued if they do not enforce the law.”

SB 1070 is so racist and over the top that it has led to a wave of outrage around the country, including condemnation from a wide spectrum of faith leaders and President Barack Obama. Many organizations and individuals have called for a boycott of Arizona, including Arizona Member of Congress Raul Grijalva, award-winning author Tayari Jones, and Washington Postcolumnist Robert McCartney.

I support these calls, just as I support efforts to oppose so-called “Secure Communities” initiatives that would require local law enforcement to work with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a manner sure to promote racial profiling and ruin community policing efforts.

I have to wonder, though, how calls to boycott Arizona–including sports boycotts and boycotts on travel to the state–are so easily endorsed in theWashington Post (McCartney: “I like the idea of a boycott because it’s so all-American”), while calls to boycott Israel for its consistent violations of Palestinian human rights and international law are deemed “controversial.”

The connections are eerie: earlier this month, a new Israeli military order came into effect in the Palestinian West Bank, which would allow the military to demand that any Palestinian, anytime, produce proof of their right to be in their home. According to the Israeli newspaperHa’aretz:

“A new military order will take effect this week, enabling the army to deport tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank and prosecute them on infiltration charges, which carry long prison terms….The order’s vague language will allow army officers to exploit it arbitrarily to carry out mass expulsions, in accordance with military orders which were issued under unclear circumstances. The first candidates for expulsion will be people whose ID cards bear addresses in the Gaza Strip, including children born in the West Bank and Palestinians living in the West Bank who have lost their residency status for various reasons.”

Sound familiar? As with SB1070, the Israeli military order purports to be in response to illegal migration (“infiltration”), but is actually a license for racial profiling and mass deportation–i.e., ethnic cleansing. And yet where was the Washington Post call for boycott?

There’s more: The Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israeli violations of international law came one year after the International Court of Justice ruled against the Israel’s “Separation Barrier,” which annexes massive sections of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. That “Barrier” (read: apartheid Wall) is being built, in part, by Elbit, an Israeli military contractor that also has half of the contract on the U.S./Mexico Border Wall.

And SB1070 is likely to lead to the type of checkpoints and arbitrary “searches” and arrests that have been daily reality for West Bank Palestinians for decades. The West Bank currently has over 500 checkpoints, roadblocks, and closures–in an area the size of Delaware, not Arizona.

Of course, in Arizona and in Palestine/Israel, many of the people affected by racist laws and policies can trace their ancestral connection to the place back well before the current (predominantly white-skinned) regimes making such racist laws came into power. That’s how colonialism and occupation works. And as Jewish Israeli Assaf Oron writes at DailyKos, racial profiling linked to ID documents is a fact of life for Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel as well.

So here’s what I’m saying: all those calling for boycotting Arizona because of a racist “documentation and deportation” law–I’m with you. And everyone who supports the Palestinian BDS call should be with you too. But we’re asking you to support boycotts targeting such racist laws, mandating displacement and ethnic cleansing, that are supported by U.S. policy and U.S. corporations, no matter where these “laws” are being made.

And yes, that includes you, faith leaders who have rightfully condemned SB1070. The Palestinian Christian community is asking you for your support, too.

Now is the time. It’s the right thing to do. And it just makes sense.

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For more information on how you can get involved with boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), check out the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation’s BDS resources. And check out the following video from Al Jazeera for more on the new Israeli military order that could lead to the displacement of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank: