The United States of America needs more than a wall. The proposed border fence, whose environmental impact will be studied this month in Brownsville, TX, is mere “tokenism,” and negative tokenism at that. Admittedly, the wall will only slow illegal immigration, not end it, so it is little more than a token of politician’s desire for immigration reform without any direct action. Martin Luther King, Jr., writes that tokenism is, “an end in itself. It’s purpose is not to begin a process, but instead to end the process of protest and pressure.” All dialogue has been silenced regarding whether or not we actually want to keep illegal immigrants out of this country, and our politicians have been mute about the 12 million extralegal immigrants already working and living productive lives in our country.
Our country of immigrants needs more than a wall, and it certainly deserves more than useless discourse about mass deportation. Deportation is a costly, ineffective, and dehumanizing way to provide “token” immigration reform. Currently, we have thousands of adults and children awaiting deportation in our centers around the U.S. The mass deportation discussed in the Senate and the House would cost almost the entire annual budget of Homeland Security, some $40 billion dollars annually over a span of five years, and all for something which has unclear warrant and efficacy.
Deportation, then, is a costly and ineffective form of dealing with extralegal immigrants. Most tragic, though, is the dehumanization deportation inevitably brings. Illegal immigrants can be deported at any time, with scant means of legal recourse. Families are routinely separated,the length of internment often indefinite, and the prosecution subtle and secretive. It must be the aim of any nonviolent movement for immigrant rights, then, to target deportation and bring these individuals out of the shadows. We must imbue immigrants, both legal and extralegal, with a sense of “somebodiness,” the same self-realization Dr. King discussed was integral to the African-American civil rights movement.
Approximately 36 million immigrants live within our nation’s assumed borders, divided nearly equally between naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents, and undocumented immigrants. Independently of each other, each of these sub-populations is a hefty constituency in these United States and can directly influence immigrant policy through determined nonviolence. Taken together, though, this enormous population which is constantly growing could and must shape our nation’s immigration policies. Immigrants on both side of the current law must join together in claiming their somebodiness as well as their human rights. Both the woman who has passed her Visa clearance and the teenage man who has been denied must join together in affirming that our current immigration quota system is broken and retrogressive. Both the high-school student with birthright citizenship and his father unable to pass his citizenship test must blend their voices in protest of a system which would keep families separate. The African, the European, the Asian, the Mexican – all immigrants past and present must unite in a nonviolent resistance to this stagnation of American immigration reform. This is a problem which must be addressed, which must be dealt with morally and politically and socially. Together we must demand fair immigration policies and accessible means to citizenship for all.
Nonviolent Migration 
October 8, 2007 at 7:40 am
Matt, I think it is important, like you say, to note that a border wall is a negative token. So too is any protest that says, ‘Keep the quotas, keep the raids, keep deporting people, just don’t build a wall.’
Like you said, we must unite to stop deportation and to demand accessible citizenship.