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Joshua Kahn Russell's Blog

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Bio:   Joshua Kahn Russell is an organizer working to bridge movements for ecological balance and racial justice. He is a strategy and non-violent direct action trainer with the Ruckus Societ... (More)

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Environmentalists say: stop ALL of Arizona's anti-immigrant law

By Joshua Kahn Russell at Jul 29, 2010

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Today, Arizona's "show me your papers" anti-immigrant law SB1070 goes into effect. Across the country, July 29th has been declared a national day of action for Human Rights. Phoenix is ground zero for the collective outrage and protest that this bill has inspired. Here thousands of people are in the streets, many showing their courage by participating in civil disobedience across the city. In particular, downtown Phoenix has been transformed into a temporary “Human Rights Zone” with public promises from communities, businesses, and police to not comply with the law. It is an inspiring moment of solidarity and protest during a very dark time. Don’t let the partial-injunction fool you, most of this law has been allowed to continue, and we all know there are no half-measures when it comes to human rights. The hate and racism we are seeing in Arizona is only the latest, in a long series of escalating demonization of brown communities.

There is one unlikely group that has joined in protest against the anti-immigrant law: Environmentalists.

As I am practicing civil disobedience in Phoenix today, I’m proud to be a part of the new generation of eco-activists who see the forests for the trees (and the people). We believe the fate of our planet intimately depends on how we treat our brothers and sisters, and that standing up for Immigrant Rights is a central element of our task.

These new environmentalists represent a new way of thinking. We’re connecting the dots: an ecosystem is your home. Economy is the management of your home. When you globalize your economy, you globalize your ecosystem. Here’s the frank outcome: the ecological systems that support life on our planet have been pushed to the brink by an economy that trashes natural resources and destroys relationships between peoples across the planet in the process. When you convert forests into paper, mountains into coal, and oceans into oil, you force people off their land and deprive those land-based peoples of the resources they depend on to survive. A key lesson from the Environmental Justice movement is that supporting those communities in protecting their land and their livelihoods is one of the most strategic ways to fight the drivers of climate change. The root cause of environmental degradation and climate change is the root cause of forced migration.



Human migration has happened throughout history. Immigration is an ever-present, beautiful fact of Arizona’s history. Migration is not the cause of the climate crisis. But displacement of humans (and the next steps of detention and deportation being put in place by SB1070) will be the result of it.

Those of us who have worked around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change know that half of the UN debates center on “adaptation.” That means finding ways to accommodate the millions of climate refugees forced to find new homes because of the droughts, floods, famines, and destabilization that comprise the climate crisis. Right now the US immigration architecture is being built out. Forward-thinking climate activists know that now is a critical time to ensure that the precedent for immigration policy in this country protects human rights because immigration is going to get a lot more common, not less.

The environmental tradition in the U.S. has a checkered history: it has a great record of supporting wildlife; less great on supporting human communities that belong to these ecosystems. Today’s environmental activist is connecting the dots between people and planet, and standing for human dignity for immigrants in our community is a key part of that. Today is a day for environmentalists to show up.

For information about the vibrant actions taking place today, stay up to date at www.altoarizona.com, and on twitter follow @puenteAZ, @ndlon

Comment On This Blog Post  See All Comments (1)

Jaiv

Immigration Reform as a Matter of National Integrity

By Ji, Swaraj at Aug 21, 2010 06:39 AM

The source of both the environmental and the human degradation that you describe is a top-down control hierarchy that alienates and appropriates what it needs for its own perpetuation without regard for the integrity of natural and social systems.

 
Current immigration policy exemplifies this by setting up an oppressive apparatus targeting immigrant workers under the pretext of limiting immigration, while in reality having no realistic prospect or intention of keeping immigrants out.  The actual purpose of the present policy is to terrorize immigrant workers so that they cannot assert their rights, thereby allowing them to be more effectively exploited as cheap labor, while preventing their views from being heard as a part of our nation's political discourse.
 
The effect of this policy is to set up a caste system within the U.S., in which undocumented immigrant workers inhabit roles within our employment, taxation, public health, housing and other systems very similar to those of citizens, but with an inferior set of rights that restricts them to substandard levels of both compensation and political participation.
 
Just as the alienation of resources from natural systems damages nature, the bifurcation of our body politic through the oppression of undocumented residents damages the integrity of the U.S. as a nation.  It sets up an oppressive apparatus that, as Frederick Douglass warned, will sooner or later be turned against those who presently think of themselves as protected from it.  It furthers elite control over employment by pitting exploited immigrant workers against other workers, thereby reducing both political and economic democracy for everyone.  And it has many similarities to the old system of U.S. slavery, which so literally threatened the integrity of these United States.  
 
In Arizona's attempt to make its own, separate, policy regarding undocumented workers we can hear echoes of the successionism of the Southern states that preceded the U.S. Civil War.  As Lincoln said, "I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free."
 
Immigration policy is made at the Federal level, and so arguments regarding changes to it will be most effective when they are made from the standpoint of what is good for the nation.  From this perspective, the argument against Arizona's attempted successionism is clear, and the Federal government already has some understanding of its interest in asserting its authority over national policy.  But we can go further by arguing for changes to the Federal policy itself that create a path to citizenship for immigrant workers, and for protecting the rights of such workers while they are on that path, while directing enforcement toward employers who exploit immigrant workers rather than toward the workers themselves.  
 
Arguments against exploitative appropriation from the natural environment are generally based upon the damage such appropriation does to the integrity of the larger natural systems that are affected by such appropriation.  Similarly, arguments against the exploitative appropriation of immigrant labor should be based upon the damage such appropriation does to the larger social systems that are affected by such policies.  Arguments from the standpoint of human rights and the environment should also be made, but the argument from the standpoint of national integrity is the umbrella for all of these when we are attempting to argue the case for a change to, and enforcement of, our national immigration policy.  
 
Anti-immigrant activists have claimed to be working to protect our national integrity by defending our borders against what they portray as an invading army of foreigners who would take our jobs, consume public resources, and contaminate the purity of our national language and culture.  They have been able to make that claim because those defending immigrant rights have not exposed the fact that the present and proposed oppressive policies toward immigrants are in fact the main threat to our national integrity, not the immigrants themselves.
 

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