Video of the March Against the Wall

 

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Duty Free

Once again, I have to point you in the direction of a friend of mine who wrote an excellent article entitled, “Duty Free.”

 

Undocumented Immigrants: The New World Order’s Civil Disobedience

**late posting for last Sunday Sept. 16, 2007**

 

Foreign policy by the US government has built countries such as Germany and Japan after World War II while at the same time destroyed other countries such as Cuba, Mexico, Philippines, and Indonesia since the “Cold War”. Countries that were destroyed had their government severely disrupted or replaced and its citizenry were forced to survive on either imposed sanctions or military invasion. Faced with such horrible circumstances many people were forced to migrate and some have come to the very oppressor’s homeland. Those citizens have been innocently attacked in their home country and again in the oppressor’s homeland.

 

This essay will argue how the US governments immigration laws are unjust using the teachings from Martin Luther King’s Jr. “Love, Law & Civil Disobedience”. It will examine the relationship between the Mexican immigrants and the United States government as a sample of the overall global immigration movement that continuously occurs to this very day. And finally will develop a praxis on the overall ideas argued.

 

Martin Luther King’s Jr. “Love, Law & Civil Disobedience” discusses just/unjust laws, suffering, love, and peace which form the principles of nonviolence civil disobedience. The civil rights movement utilized King’s teachings to overturn the injustices facing the community of African-Americans. Indeed King mentions all struggle between exploited and oppressors can be waged with either violence, apathy or nonviolence. He emphasizes that nonviolence is the most appropriate means to the ends of freedom, justice, and liberation since “immoral destructive means cannot bring about moral & constructive ends”. He cites various examples of success but one great example was the struggle of the Abolitionists against the US government slave laws; they consistently used civil disobedience to successfully end the unjust and blatant inhumane laws.

 

Using King’s interpretation of unjust laws, it is immediately apparent that the US government laws are once again problematic. As before with the slave and racial segregation laws the US government immigration laws were passed in exclusion of the inflicted minority. King describes such laws as unjust since the “minority had no right to vote…so that the legislative bodies that made these laws were not democratically elected”. Whenever a law is enacted without a true democratic process, that is the inclusion of those who will be affected, is a cause for questioning the law’s morality and, ultimately, its justice.

 

King understood that suffering can bring about social change and can occur by either enacting violence unto others or by taking unearned violence. He also described love to be “understanding, creative, redemptive, goodwill to all…” and “…which seeks nothing in return”. And how two types of peace commonly share an absence of tension but one is defined as negative since it is with unjust laws while the other define as positive is with just laws and love.

 

The immigrants coming from various parts of the globe are similar to the African-American who lived in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama prior to and during the civil rights movement. Both groups suffered severe and unwarranted economic racism and institutionalized segregation. Both have been excluded from participating in any form of dialog or democratic process concerning those very same laws that were inflicted upon them. And both have been victimized by the same oppressor, namely the United States government. The differences are geographic and citizenship. The African-Americans during that time period, some would argue that it still goes on now, have been singled out as second-class citizens in their own country through unjust domestic laws that have caused violent suffering and impoverishment. Whereas undocumented immigrants have been classified as “Aliens”, now possible “Terrorists”, through unjust foreign policy laws that have caused violent suffering and impoverishment in their home country.

The current relationship between the Mexican undocumented immigrants and the US government as describe by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) illustrates the extent of the US government foreign policy on the undocumented immigrants home countries. NAFTA has brought new exploitative wage jobs and has flooded Mexico with extremely cheap US government subsidized corn that have priced local farmers out of the market.¹ These laws have brought about a combination of negative peace, great unearned suffering to the citizens of Mexico, and migration with complete disregard of the political/economic barriers that is almost entirely based on love for their families.

 

Whether conscious or not the citizens of Mexico who have come undocumented into the US are engaged in civil disobedience. Indeed every citizen who immigrates illegally to the US from a foreign country that has been inflicted unjustly by US foreign policy is practicing what can be called the New World Order’s Civil Disobedience. They are all engaged in the struggle of our time between enslavement by unjust law and true freedom. This new wave of “NWO Civil Disobedience” must now also be undertaken by the citizens of the US who are aware of the overall injustice that these global immigrants face. Doing so will immediately stop the cooperation with evil foreign policy that is now further deepening the cesspool of hate, war, and eventual hell on earth.

1: Dolores Huerta; http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2007/backtalk.asp