Education Not Deportation

At UCLA, student protestors claim their right to be educated in the place where they have lived and live.

A Cauldron of Dreams Bubbling

The political activism of undocumented youth has started to gain the ear of American media. This week, an Atlantic writer who did a good job portraying the way status really drags people off their heretofore path as they finish high school. The Connecticut kids find themselves especially blocked. New York City kids actually have the advantage of a formidable, if chronically frustrating, public transportation system. I, for one, am a documented person that does not have a car. The car is often a key resource when looking for a job, or looking for a romantic partner. I still remember a woman I worked with at Marshall's in Buffalo who had to take three buses to get to work, and I remember her crying when she was fired for being late to work, when it took her an hour and a half to get there. But a driver's license is still the norm to buy alcohol or cigarettes in New York City.

The Huffington Post also has a blog series by 12 young writer-activists that tells personal stories and shows the resolve of young people in gaining their shot at the American Dream. The organization of activists seems strongest in California, where 10 of the 12 writers live (the other two seem to live in Florida according to the site). Illinois also has a strong organizational base. If these regional strengths were extended, and the moral standing of kids growing up without papers was deepened in local communities, we might finally start to see political shift. If they could talk more openly about their status, if schools addressed their needs straight-forwardly, and if church and other religious groups spoke out on the universal aspects of being a person, people who living, instead of fighting out battles on sexual practices, if, if, if...

Some Dream Act Protesters

What can you do? You can search out a local organization that helps undocumented immigrants or organizes protests. You can subscribe to groups on Facebook that keep you updated on stories: New York Immigration Coalition, Make the Road, New York State Youth Leadership Council, National Immigrant Youth Alliance, MALDEF, Define American and more. When you read the stories of how the US is treating kids, there is no other choice but to start to act. You can write a message about it on your Facebook, you can write your Senator, your Representatives, you can participate in marches, you can start an online petition, you can talk to your friends about it, you can write a letter to the Editor. Those things won't solve all the problems but will at least start to organize New York so it acts as a leader on undocumented issues like Los Angeles and Chicago do today. And when the kids who face the biggest risk can protest, so can we.

Public (recognition)

Around the corner from my apartment in east Paris 50 years ago, 9 people were killed, scores injured and hundreds traumatized for life. A recent night, organized by the Human Rights League, some 150 protesters, community members, and writers met to mark the anniversary with a showing of the documentary, To Die at Metro Charonne, Why?  The answer is they were protesting the Secret Army Organization (OAS), an extreme right group that supported a continued French presence in Algeria, and that assassinated people that were against them.

To hear the voices of the white-haired tremble as they described how the police beat on their heads and blocked their passage, to the point where children and fathers and sisters were killed, was quite moving and provokes a respect of having lived through struggle.

Witnesses described billowing chaos that makes it difficult to trace the exact way the police contributed to the massacre. They cut off roads, beat those who tried to breach their lines, and forced people down stairwells where they were trampled by other fleeing protesters. 

It is in the hideous melee that the suffocated victims perished.

The police refused to release their confidential documents on the tragedy. The documents that remain will surely not be the most incriminating.  Police who tried to speak about what happened received death threats. In the end, people still don’t know what happened exactly, the accounts can clash, frustrating people’s need for closure.

Why does the Paris police still fail to recognize any wrongdoing?

Maybe the answer has to do with 1) a recognition of their dominance, that it would take an enormous amount of public pressure to force them to come clean, 2) the support of the external war regime within the country would be more controversial today, and 3) it would blemish the prestige of heroic figures like De Gaulle that okayed the reprisal. All of these could potentially reduce the power of the French state.

How can citizens fight against these dominant technologies of the state, of the police, weapons, communications, and outright refusals to provide information?

Who has the right to public recognition has everything to do with how the machinations of power clench on the bodies of its citizens.

Note:  While this event was in my neighborhood, on the other side of Paris, police murdered hundreds of peacefully protesting Algerians, known as the October 17 massacre. Police threw the bodies into the Seine, which were found downriver for weeks. This event barely made the papers.   

An Algerian flag commemorates the bodies of protesters thrown in the Seine river.

MLK Day Prize: Education Without Borders Network

I just got back from the national meeting of the Education Without Borders Network in pretty Amiens, France (most famous for its marvelous cathedral). The marvel is really the existence of the network and the work it does protecting undocumented students and their families. These citizens would make Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., proud. (Happy birthday, MLK!)

Their logo above explains a lot of how they see things. The police are taking children out of classrooms, putting them in handcuffs, and deporting them. Legal protection of children is taken seriously here, and deportation evokes World War II trains heading to concentration camps to the east. So, when Sarkozy took over as Minister of the Interior in 2004 (again) and introduced new overzealous immigration measures, a mass of teachers, parents, unions,and other organizations came together to form the Network.

Who can imagine a classmate shackled and led to a plane while the other students in the class recite the national motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity?

So the network came together by 2004, and a most quintessential action took place in the neighborhood where I do my field work, in the spring of 2007. Three police cars arrive to take away a grandfather who was waiting for his grandson to come out of elementary school (this was a policy put in place with Sarkozy as Minister of the Interior). As you can see in the video, a crowd crystallizes instantly, and forms a barrier to prevent the police from leaving with the grandpa. They have whistles, and even lay out in the street to prevent the police cars from taking off. There are a few videocameras filming and you can watch the episode here and here.  The resistance to the police tactics is effective in the end, and the grandpa is released.     

An Undocumented Youth= A Stolen Youth

Teachers and parents of the network are active in schools, give advice to kids and their families. They 'godparent' students and families in the municipal halls. Entire schools mobilize to support a single undocumented student! They travel together to the courtroom or to the police headquarters in an extraordinary show of solidarity. And this apprenticeship into citizenship is didactic, providing real-life experiences of how democracy works. On a more personal level, I also hear from kids about how they feel included, how the stigma recedes, and how they are inspired to become French.   

Who’s to say to these kids they are not integrated, when they have the community in the streets on their behalf? 

Thanks to Amiens for having us and to the Lukowskis for the hospitality! 

13th century Cathedral of Amiens

Mission Alabama: Popular support

In June, Alabama passed America's harshest anti-undocumented immigrant (and generally anti-immigrant) law, and most parts were upheld in September by Federal District Court Judge Blackburn. This law forces schools to ask enrolling students about their immigration status, makes it illegal to help any undocumented immigrant with a ride, disbars any (existing) property ownership by undocumented immigrants, makes getting flu shots and getting garbage picked up difficult, and allows police to ask for proof of immigration status when there is "reasonable suspicion" the person is here illegally.


This law has already had a deep destabilizing effect on immigrant communities. Kids stopped going to school for fear of deportation. Some residents left their property in the hands of neighbors and friends. A judge last week postponed a provision that required mobile home residents to show immigration status for registration. 


Who is for and who is against this type of anti-family and anti-child policy? 

Who supports this hateful, discriminatory law? For the first time in 136 years, both houses of the Alabama legislature turned Republican, who quickly got to work and passed the most anti-immigrant law in the country. And after running with a tough anti-undocumented migrant stance, the Republican governor signed this law. People like this professor of law think it is "permissible and sensible" to collect stats on and criminalize families. And the president of an organization of judges estimates 80% of the state supports the law.

So families are under attack in Alabama! Who supports them? The bishops, the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Justice Department has appealed to protect Congress' full powers to pass legislation on immigration matters.

In Montgomery, Alabama, a rally took place on Saturday, with the CEO of the NAACP and a few other national figures. Most of the figures put the protesters in the hundreds. A heinous policy gets passed, and a rally with national-level organizers gets only hundreds??? 

Yesterday afternoon, a low-level rally of maybe a thousand supporters of undocumented rights rallied through the streets of East Paris. After the rally, I discussed the American undocumented situation with a group of undocumented youth here yesterday, and they asked about the impact of American religiosity. Where are all the religious people to stand up for families?

 
Good question.