A Blog Posting by Ben Price of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, from April 2, 2017. This blog was first published in Pathways Magazine., pages 37 to 39.
The attack on so-called “undocumented” people, and the cult of fear evangelized so effectively by Donald Trump, have led people of conscience to propose and in some places to adopt community level laws that offer sanctuary to groups of human beings now targeted as public enemies, just for being members of those groups whose “papers are not in order.” The irony of media churned anxiety over immigration is that the “news” is so old-hat – people move to places where they think they might create better lives for their families.
There are borders on maps, created through conquest and war, but that doesn’t stop rivers from flowing across them. It doesn’t stop the wind from blowing or birds from flying across them. And it doesn’t stop jobs from leaving, bribes from coming in, or the U.S. military from deploying personnel in 156 nations, with military bases in 63 countries on the other side of that border, whether or not the people living in those countries want them or see them as “legal.” Laws about borders don’t stop any of these things, only poor people who have a right to move freely.
When we think of “undocumented” people in the U.S. crossing the border with Mexico, the irony is that the border changed dramatically after the U.S. war of conquest in the 1840s. Prior to then, Anglos in what are now California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado and Wyoming could have been labeled “undocumented” by Mexico. What changed? The border – an imaginary line got moved. What tools were used to bring about the change? Weapons, violence, and political bluster; the same tools being used to push millions of people on the current U.S. side of the border over to the current Mexican side.
The truth is that borders don’t exist in the real world. They are not empirically observable, not from space and not at ground level. Maybe the fences and walls are real, but a physical barrier asserting that a metaphysical illusion is real doesn’t make it so. During the so-called “cold war” Churchill claimed rhetorically that an “iron curtain” had descended across the European continent, although the Soviet Union had erected no such colossus. As we know, the high security checkpoints throughout Europe didn’t save the Soviet Empire, and even the tangible Berlin Wall came down to global cheers.
Let those who enthusiastically support Trump’s paranoiac call for a wall across the nation’s southern border risk the integrity of their delusions by considering these realities.
If being “undocumented” is such a concern, why aren’t the newspapers and networks and cables full of investigative journalism exposing the lack of documentation for trillions of public dollars unaccountably “missing” from military records? What about the lack of documentation of the names of corporations and billionaires that are buying our elections? And maybe Action News and The Situation Room could beat the drum, or at least give a little drum roll, and sound the alarm for undocumented police-on-citizen violence. How about the intentional undocumentation by the EPA when it redacts evidence that fracking in fact poisons groundwater? Or the judiciary’s defense of frackers proprietary “right” not to disclose what toxins they inject down past our aquifers inside the borders of our home towns and counties? Is undocumented pollution the same as a lack of pollution?
By that logic “illegal” undocumented people are just a figment of fear. Oh that’s right. That’s what they are. People can’t be illegal, but policies that strip them of fundamental rights can be.
If, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, all of us are born equal with certain unalienable rights, does that mean just U.S. citizens? But wait; there was no U.S. when the Declaration was written, and the reason that it was written was to make the case that those rights exist in all of us, just by virtue of being born, and that we create governments like the United States “to secure these rights.”
So when a government created to secure rights belonging to people regardless of what side of the border they were born on presumes to strip those rights and treat “undocumented” people as less than birds, bribes, rivers, wind, money, troops, tortoises, jobs and armadillos that cross the border unharassed, the rest of us have the power and authority to contravene those unjust, unconsented tyrannies and create sanctuaries for our oppressed fellow human beings. Of all the corrupt, obscene, dishonest prostitutions of law that now plague our profligate and fraudulent nation; declaring fellow humans to be “illegal” is perhaps the most indecent. MORE…