From marching to a movement

Saturday, May 29

Southeast Phoenix, House of Roberto and Leticia, 4:30 p.m.

AS THE rally at the state capitol is winding down, Norma Villegas, an activist from San Diego, describes to me a conversation she had with Roberto, a Phoenix resident she met during the afternoon. Roberto told Norma that whole families have been leaving his neighborhood as police harassment, raids and deportations have stepped up dramatically during the last year--even before the passage of SB 1070.

Norma is visibly affected by the story Roberto related to her, and she tells me that he is willing to be interviewed in his home, despite the fact that he and his wife Leticia are undocumented. We call him--within an hour, we are sitting in his living room, and they are offering us lemonade.

The passage of SB 1070, explains Roberto, has further heightened the anxiety and stress of not knowing whether the next corner might bring a traffic stop followed by detention and deportation.

"Three weeks ago, my daughter's friend came to pick her up to go to school, and when they turned the corner, they saw a police car," explains Leticia. "They stopped her, but they wouldn't tell her why they stopped her. When she asked, they just laughed. My daughter's friend is a citizen, and she had her license and her documents."

Roberto explains that this is a relatively recent development. "Before last year, you could show your Mexican driver's license to a police officer, and they would be ok with it," says Roberto. "Since last year, they started to stop people for nothing, and they will detain you with a U.S. license. When you see a police car behind you, you get really nervous."

For 13 years, Roberto and Leticia have lived and worked in Arizona, and because of the difficulty in crossing the border without papers, have been unable to visit friends and family since they left their home in Mexico City. Roberto says:

In recent years, the majority of American people, especially the upper class, has become more mean-spirited toward immigrants. I work for rich people, and they say, because of what they hear from the authorities, that we immigrants are a problem because we waste government money. They say that of the $600 they pay for insurance, $400 goes to cover immigrants and $200 for their actual coverage. They say that they pay a lot of taxes that end up being used to feed us.

We don't even go to restaurants any more because we are treated so badly. We get mean stares, but we pay the same as everyone else for the food.

The anti-immigrant resentment stirred up by such arguments is as intense as it is misplaced. Because roughly 75 percent of undocumented workers work using false Social Security numbers, they pay into the Medicare and Social Security funds without ever being able to collect those benefits. Undocumented workers pay $6-7 billion to the Social Security fund and $1.5 billion to Medicare each year. And, of course, the undocumented pay sales tax, just like everyone else.

On the other hand, the only public services that undocumented workers and their families receive are access to public education and emergency room medical services.

But fear of being detained and deported leads many to avoid even emergency room treatment at all costs--some even return to Mexico for medical services. (Ironically, tens of thousands of American citizens also go to Mexico for various medical services because doctor appointments, dental checkups and prescription drugs are far cheaper.)

The people who deserve blame for the shoddy state of social services in the U.S. are not immigrants but the politicians themselves--for systematically underfunding social service agencies and granting massive tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, thus squandering revenue that could have been used to meet pressing needs.

For their part, undocumented workers on average pay $80,000 more in taxes than they will receive in social services over the course of their lifetimes, as even U.S. government officials acknowledge. So exactly who is sponging resources from whom?

"In just the last two weeks, a lot of people have left, to Mexico, to other countries and other states," continues Roberto.

"My son is in eighth grade, and he was telling us that many of his friends in school will leave Arizona in the summer," says Leticia.

"We want to stay. We like this city, and we're grateful for everything that we have experienced here," says Roberto. "But you can end up in prison serving six months just for not having papers. So now there are a lot of empty houses on our block, and people are breaking in to get whatever is left. Someone even broke a window here last week because they thought that the house was empty."

Sadly, the only alternative Roberto and Leticia seem to have at this point is to live in the self-imposed prison of their house. "We don't really go out anymore," says Roberto. "We work, we go to the grocery store, and we come home."

Sometimes, even work isn't safe. In March, when Sheriff Joe Arpaio's deputies raided four Phoenix-area McDonald's on March 26, Leticia's aunt was among those deported, taking her away from her four children who live in the U.S.

"The managers knew that Arpaio's men were coming and didn't tell the employees," Leticia says, shaking her head. "They took my 57-year-old aunt. She had also been in the U.S. for 13 years. She wasn't allowed to take anything with her, and she was deported in her McDonald's uniform. They told her if you don't sign the deportation papers, you will go to prison. Her four children are living here, and she doesn't have any children in Mexico."

Roberto worries that his immediate family may be next. "We think that if the law goes into effect, we can't stay here, especially because of my daughter. She's 18, and she only has her ID from college, she doesn't have papers. It's scary. We may have to leave our house, leave everything behind."

The afternoon is turning to evening, and we express our gratitude to Roberto and Leticia for inviting us into their home and talking with us. But they want to thank us. "Thank you so much for listening to our worries," says Roberto. "We know God is with us, but it's sad. We just want normal lives."

Phoenix, Conference room at an airport hotel, 6 p.m.

THREE VETERANS of the civil rights movement's Freedom Summer in 1964 came to Phoenix for the day of action, and in the evening after the march, MacArthur Cotton, Jesse Harris and Betty Robinson gathered with some 40 activists to talk about the lessons they took from the voter registration and education campaigns in Mississippi half a century ago.

Freedom Summer brought more than 1,000 out-of-state volunteers together with thousands of local activists to organize against racist violence, discrimination in public accommodations and other civil rights violations in Jim Crow Mississippi.

"It all began in 1961," says Harris. "We were involved in direct action--street demonstrations, protests at lunch counters and public accommodations--until SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] came to Mississippi. When [SNCC field director] Bob Moses came, we turned to voter registration, because voters had to pass a written test and pay a poll tax," says Jesse. These tests were used to deny the right to vote and deny political power to Blacks, who made up 80 to 90 percent of the population in the counties where most organizing was done.

Today, activists in Arizona are contemplating a similar plan of direct action and volunteer organizers from out of state as a way to tap into the outpouring of solidarity from around the country and strengthen local organizing efforts.

Arizona activists weren't the only ones looking to gain insight from the experience of the Freedom Summer veterans. An African American woman from New Orleans who has been involved in post-Katrina organizing efforts asked about how to engage people who are hopeless and demoralized--as many African Americans in New Orleans are today.

"At the heart of every injustice is a lie," says Rev. Phil Lawson, also a veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement. "And you have to figure out how to expose that lie."

In an interview, Lawson tells me the lie is that:

brown and black people are not as valuable as white people. In no state in the union would a legislator pass a law requiring police officers to ask Caucasian people who are British or Irish if they have their papers. The only reason Arizona passed that law is that they know the dominant immigrant community there is brown people from Mexico.

That law wouldn't be passed in South Dakota, where there are Russians and Irish and British and Canadians. That law wouldn't be passed anywhere except where brown people can be identified and therefore subjected to the embarrassment of their rights by asking for papers."

Sunday, May 30

Phoenix College, Activist organizing conference, 9:30 a.m.

IT'S PRETTY early on a Sunday, and the day after a grueling afternoon spent under the sun, but about 150 young people, activists and organizers are gathered for an organizing conference about how to move forward the resistance to SB 1070 and the rest of Arizona's anti-immigrant laws.

Isabel García, co-chair of the Coalición de Derechos Humanos (Coalition for Human Rights) from Tucson, is part of an opening panel to address the context of yesterday's historic march and the future of local organizing efforts, where she says:

There is so much to talk about, but I think that we've got to leave here very clear about how to build a movement. Not how to get up and vote right now, not how to lobby--it may make some of us feel good to lobby, but where has it gotten us? Until we do "el trabajo de la hormiga"--the work of the ant, as they say--to educate communities, only then will "our powerbrokers" get our power and broker something. We know that is the reality.

It's essential that we break this framework of criminality. We cannot accept Obama calling us illegals. We cannot accept Obama in a speech with Calderón saying, "You broke the law, you've got to pay a fine."

After slavery was abolished, what did the powerful people do? They used the criminal justice system to control us, and that's exactly what's happening here in Arizona. I remember in December 2006 what Julie Myers, then head of ICE, said after a raid at a Swift plant: "This is to signal enforcement will not remain at the border."

But while it seems simple, it's really complex, because the wider community is so ignorant--the U.S. public generally, but it's not just the white community. I hate to tell you this fact, but in November 2006, about 47 percent of Hispanic voters voted for those four anti-immigrant measures, which shows you the real need for the political consciousness building. We have got to focus on political education.

They know very well that migration is not an issue of law enforcement, and it's not an issue of national security. It's due to economic, political and social conditions. With our demand for drugs, for instance, and our clampdown and militarization of Mexico, we are going to see more and more migration. That's why we have to smash the framework of criminality and national security.

After the plenary sessions, there were breakout sessions by state and region. There was one group for Arizona, one for Texas and one for California. A fourth brought together the rest of us--from states such as Rhode Island, Colorado, Illinois and Wisconsin. The discussions focused on the implications of Arizona's SB 1070 for local organizing, as well as how organizers outside of Arizona can raise awareness about SB 1070 and give concrete support to the struggle here.

Chandler, Ariz., Emergency Summit for Immigrant Justice, 10:30 a.m.

AT THE same time that organizers were meeting at Phoenix College, another group of some 90 delegates from a variety of national and local immigrant rights organizations were discussing the reconfiguration of a national strategy to achieve legalization for the 12 million undocumented workers in the U.S.

Justin Akers Chacón, co-author with Mike Davis of No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, attended as a delegate from the Sí Se Puede Immigrant Rights Organization in San Diego. He described the political setting for the conference:

To this point, the immigrant rights movement has supported Democratic politicians in the hopes that they would pass comprehensive immigration reform once they got in office. The idea was that by conceding on the inclusion of increased enforcement measures in this reform, it would build bipartisan support and allow for a path to legalization for undocumented workers.

This has been the strategy for a large part of the immigrant rights movement since the emergence of the 2006 mass protests against the Sensenbrenner bill that would have made it a federal crime to give aid of any kind to an undocumented worker.

Now the Democrats have taken control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House, but two years later, the general consensus is that this strategy has not only failed to achieve immigration reform, but the situation for immigrants has actually deteriorated--with higher rates of deportation, more sophisticated workplace raids and increased militarization of the border. All of the things that people believed would get better have gotten worse.

For this reason, the National Latino Congreso organized this Emergency Summit for Immigrant Justice in order to develop support for their new strategy--but a strategy that seemed to retain some elements of the old one.

According to Akers, the proposal has two main components:

The first is a plan to hold the Democrats accountable through a campaign to register voters in districts where there's a large pool of Latino voters, but the congressional representative doesn't vote in line with the immigrant rights movement. They identified 20 Democratic and 12 Republican districts. The idea is that this will hold politicians accountable by directing voters against those who don't support reform.

Early on, everyone agreed, at least rhetorically, to the slogan "No reelection without legalization" as a way to frame this campaign. There was no shortage of frustration and disgust with the inaction of the Democrats in power, but this was mostly at the level of rhetoric, because in practice, this campaign is still designed to provide voter support for candidates willing to pledge themselves to immigration reform while in office. So this isn't really a break with the strategy of "Today we march, tomorrow we vote" that has guided the movement until this point.

They did include one way to try to accommodate dissenters from this program, which was to embrace the idea that this strategy should incorporate campaigns of resistance and civil disobedience. It wasn't clear how this would be done in practice, but it was included in the language of the strategy.

The second part of the strategy came to be called the "down-payment strategy."

The starting point was that because political leaders have put off comprehensive immigration reform until after November, it's strategically savvy to fight for small components of immigration reform, such as the DREAM Act and a program to give legal status to farmworkers who have a sustained work record stretching back three or five years. But critics were justifiably concerned that this would be nothing more than a new bracero program that would enshrine a diminished set of workers' rights for migrant workers.

A minority current at the conference has focused on community organizing and organizing immigrant workers in workplaces with an emphasis on sustained campaigns of struggle and political independence from the Democratic Party.

This is important because we've seen the energy of protest movements siphoned off during election years, allowing the Democratic Party to evade having to answer a strong and confident movement in the midst of their electoral campaigns. This means that Democrats, instead of having to deal with a strong voice from our side, adapt to the demands of big business and the anti-immigrant terms of debate set by Republicans.

So we need a strong independent movement, we need more marches, but we also need new strategies and tactics--boycotts, strikes, sit-ins and other forms of protest that disrupt business as usual.

The potential for mass action is greater today than it's been in some time, because of the ongoing assaults on the rights of immigrants. That's the only thing that can force the political establishment to hear our demands. So the time to build a movement that can demand legalization for all without conditions is now.