Immigrants' Wall of Death

By Roberto Lovato, The Nation. Posted March 24, 2006.

Under a white tent on the Francisco de Miranda Air Force Base in the La Carlota neighborhood of this Venezuelan metropolis, immigrant leaders from all over the hemisphere debated and discussed immigration policies, critiquing the obsession with national security that has warped the debate over reform and laying out their alternative visions.

Filling the sultry, jet-fuel-infused air on the base with Caribbean, Colombian, Brazilian Portuguese and other accents, speaker after speaker denounced the social exclusion faced by immigrants -- and immigrant advocates -- from Alaska to Patagonia. And more than a few railed against El Muro de la Muerte (the Wall of Death), which has already killed thousands -- and will kill thousands more if the U.S. Congress passes the Sensenbrenner immigration bill.

The bill, which has set off alarms in immigrant communities, would make it a crime (rather than a civil violation) to be undocumented or to offer aid to the undocumented. It would also turn local police into enforcers of immigration law and extend the Wall of Death along 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexican border.

On the sidelines, Chris Jimenez squirmed and grimaced, preparing to lash out at the Sixth World Social Forum (Foro) here in Caracas. He fidgeted as colleagues sitting beneath the giant tent housing the panel on "Migration Policy, Discrimination and Xenophobia" described how immigration policy in countries like Costa Rica, Ecuador and even liberal-left Brazil is starting to resemble the militarized and racist policy of the United States.

Finally, Jimenez, an immigrants-rights activist with the American Friends Service Committee, stood up and described the two-front war he and others face behind the Muro. "We're fighting the Minutemen at the border in California. We also have to deal with racism within our movement," he declared. And then, as if pointing to some invisible figure standing next to him, he added, "None of the whites who spoke on behalf of the U.S. delegation at the opening ceremonies of the Foro remembered to mention the more than 35 million immigrants in the United States."

Though Jimenez and other immigrant advocates spent a considerable amount of time analyzing the myopia, limits and dangers of U.S. immigration policy, the bulk of their time at the Foro was reserved for a more transcendental matter: how to globalize the debate around and practice of immigration policy.

Jimenez and more than 30 immigrant leaders descended on the Foro with a mission to link their U.S. struggle to a resurgent, insurgent Latin American left that is electing presidents (think of the recent inauguration of indigenous leader Evo Morales in Bolivia and the election of Chile's first socialist woman president, Michelle Bachelet), defeating U.S.-sponsored free-trade agreements and calling for integracion desde abajo (integration from below) as the way to solve immigration and other issues in the hemisphere.

Foro participants like Jimenez explored and proposed alternatives to the punitive, security-focused approach of politicos and governments defending integracion desde arriba (integration from above), which allows goods but not people to move freely across borders. The proposals and concrete projects shared over intense sessions, replete with food, cigarettes and music, and lasting well into the evening, represented participants' best efforts to make real the theme of the Foro: Another World Is Possible.

U.S. representatives of some of the hometown associations that send more than $45 billion annually to build and sustain towns and entire regions regaled their southern homologues with stories of how they are doing the work that was supposed to be done by national governments and agencies like USAID, which budgeted less than $746 million in Latin American aid for the 2006 fiscal year. In turn, South American activists described how they demanded -- and secured -- agreements allowing for the free movement of people between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile and Bolivia as part of the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) trade agreement.

Together, the U.S. Foro delegates and their Latin American peers plan to continue and expand joint binational and multinational lobbying efforts leveraging the power of U.S. and other Latin American immigrant communities to influence governments of the Southern Cone -- and the United States. Their radical vision was perhaps best embodied by proposals for a hemispheric citizenship along the lines of the European model.

But those who believe another world of immigration policy is possible are also muy pragmaticos about how to get there. Oscar Chacon, leader of the U.S. Latino immigrant delegation and of Enlaces America, sees "three great obstacles" to a more enlightened U.S. debate. The first, he says, is the "racism and xenophobia" within the mostly white-led immigrants-rights movement in the United States.

Roberto Lovato is a Los Angeles-based writer.

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