A radical turn

Though a Google alert on immigration reform, I found this disturbing link from a pro-immigrant Web site that is pleased that the Senate's comprehensive immigration reform has stalled.

Here are a couple of excerpts from a post by Roberto Lovato, a New York-based writer with New America Media.

My experiences on different sides of the border lead me to believe that war and the rise of a national security state necessitate a new response from movimiento leaders. We need to complement current efforts at policy reform while moving beyond some of the more reformist politics that rode and channeled the movimiento’s momentum into electoral politics and Beltway policy circles. This reformism is now short-circuiting the electric sensations and aspirations of millions who marched. Rather than deal with the deadly anti-immigrant climate solely through marches, lobbying and other important methods we used in California, the movimiento must confront the extremist, national security-infused politics of immigration in a manner more resembling the peaceful yet militant methods being honed in the insurgent continent, where people shut down corporate media in Oaxaca and took over presidential palaces in Bolivia.
It only takes a few thousand marchers to build our own wall—a human wall—around ICE or Minutemen offices and stop business as usual. We could also hurt the bottom line of a specific multinational corporation, one that’s fomenting migration by economically strangling entire countries. Instead of sending money home using multinational banks that are destroying home countries, why not charge a people’s tax by boycotting them?

These and other kinds of actions are necessary because, in the best of all possible outcomes, current “immigration reform” will result in nothing less than the greatest threat to immigrant life in the history of the United States. Regardless of whether there’s a legalization of 12 million people or a guest worker program or no law passed, the number of immigrant workers exploited in rural and urban areas will expand and deepen; the number of families separated and terrorized by raids will grow; the number of children and adults in immigrant prisons will increase; the number of dead in the desert will multiply; the number of ordinances outlawing housing, drivers licenses, etc. will proliferate. The plight of those writer Walter Mosley calls “brown slaves” will continue sliding into chaos and suffering imaginable only by those who have lived literal slavery.

Rather than accept the corporate media’s declarations of the movement’s death, we ourselves should declare: “Immigration reform is dead.” In its place, we should continue working quietly toward alternative visions accompanied by more radical action, building grassroots power while overcoming fear of the state, corporate and other elitist forms of power.



TK: It seems the conservatives have resisted immigration reform because of its pathway to legalization, while some pro-immigrant voices call immigration reform "the greatest threat to immigrant life in the U.S." In fact, the greatest threat to life in the U.S. may be a continuation of current policy of nearly open borders that not only fails to control illegal immigrants but also fails agricultural producers by denying them access to a legal workforce.