By David Swanson, 8/2/06
I’ll grant you that in the United States our two big political
parties never nominate a candidate of, by, or for poor people.
Nonetheless, we have now established a pattern of stolen elections, and
we have NOT taken over our nation’s capital to demand justice. This
fact alone would make me ashamed right now not to be a Mexican. The
Mexicans are doing the only sensible thing they can, the only thing
that can prevent a slide into far more serious dangers.
Here in the United States, however, we don’t just have stolen
elections. Our nation’s capital is home to a White House that has
eliminated the Congress and the Supreme Court from any serious role in
our government, not to mention a Congress that has rolled over and
refused to resist. Our unelected president has reversed 800 acts of
Congress, torn up half the Bill of Rights, launched an illegal war
based on lies, facilitated another one, locked people up without charge
or trial and tortured them, and launched massive spying operations
outside the rule of law. And, yet, we do not fill the streets.
This Sunday, the truly dedicated will take up residence anew at Camp
Casey in Crawford, Texas. On September 5, Camp Casey will move to the
National Mall in Washington, D.C., and expand into Camp Democracy – an
attempt to force fundamental change. One of the groups that will play a
lead role in Camp Democracy is immigrants and activists for immigrants’
rights. Some immigrants’ rights groups will also hold a rally and march
in DC on September 7. In recent months, the ability of immigrants to
turn out and march in the United States has shamed all native-born
agitators for justice.
Not only do we all need to learn from the immigrants’ rights
movement. We all need to get behind it and support it. The anti-war
movement, in particular, should be backing the cause of immigrants’
rights with everything we’ve got. And when non-immigrants lobby their
elected representatives on any other issue, they should always raise
the cause of immigrants’ rights as well. Because their cause is our
cause. Americans’ willingness to abuse Iraqis is not separate from our
willingness to discriminate against Muslim Americans and Americans of
Arab or Mexican descent. This time it’s not “first they came for the
communists, then they came for the Jews.” This time, it’s “first they
came for the immigrants.”
And that is the point at which to stop it.
Halliburton is building detention camps for “immigration
emergencies.” But what are those? An expansion of NAFTA? A surge in
global warming? Or are they the sort of emergencies in which segments
of our population become guilty until proven innocent?
My Congressman, Republican Bush-follower Virgil Goode, recently put
out a statement arguing for allowing the minimum wage to continue to
decrease because restoring any of its value would attract immigrants to
this country. Goode can’t seriously imagine that anyone doesn’t realize
that non-immigrants, too, are affected by the minimum wage. It’s just
that we’ve reached the point at which fear of immigrants is expected to
persuade us to abuse ourselves, to pick up the chains and voluntarily
slip them on. Bush’s new proposal for detaining people without charge
or probable cause or access to an attorney targets citizens, not just
immigrants. We are all in this together, including the Iraqis and the
Lebanese and the Palestinians. Only a people that has been trained to
fear and abuse others could tolerate what our government is doing to
those peoples. Recent immigrants know this better than the rest of us,
and we should be recruiting them into the peace movement.
(And, by the way, has anyone nationally noticed that progressive
pro-peace Democratic candidate Al Weed is rapidly closing in on Goode
in the polls?)
Last week an angry Muslim attacked a Jewish institution in Seattle.
The Council on American Islamic Relations released a statement urging
us not to bring the war home. But the war is, from the start, home. The
war is in the heart of every American not camped out in our nation’s
capital demanding an end to the insanity and a restoration of the rule
of law.
Did you know that many immigrants join the U.S. military as a step
toward citizenship (or death)? Did you know that when people become
citizens, they must answer whether they’ve ever been a communist or a
homosexual? Did you know that they still can never become president”
because then we would have needed to ask whether they’d ever
slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Arabs or lied to Congress or
tortured innocent prisoners.
Did you know that this nation is almost entirely one of immigrants
and the descendants of slaves, that recent immigrants do not drain our
economy — the war does; that the criminals are in DC, not on the
border; and that the “Immigration Problem” is a problem of
discrimination and fear mongering, not criminality. If we didn’t want
Mexicans to come north, why did we NAFTA them? Even Ross Perot has to
have understood that giant sucking sounds are heard on both sides of a
border erased by corporate greed, even if rebuilt by the corporate
military.
As my friend Travis Morales points out, the current debate in
Congress and the media is over how to make things worse. The polls
focus on how sad we should be if no immigration bill is passed during
this Congress. But, as long as all the bills take us back to a formal
system of apartheid, to a legalized second-class status, should we be
sorry not to see them pass?
If we are going to change the debate, we are going to have to join
forces and recognize that this is all one movement. Immigrants should
not be afraid of opposing the war – opposing the war is majority
opinion, and the stronger it grows, the more minds are moved away from
xenophobia and racism. Peace activists should not be afraid of
immigrants’ rights, and should never expect to win respect for distant
unseen Iraqis if they cannot win it for present refugees from NAFTA.
Nor should any of us back away from “raising” the minimum wage,
which CBS says has 85% support. That’s the same percentage of Americans
who back single-payer health care, the solution still feared by the man
who had his election stolen in 2004.
Halting global warming, reforming elections and the media, restoring
the right to organize a union, beginning impeachment investigations –
these are all majority positions led by campaigns that sometimes fail
to take on each other’s causes for fear of alienating supporters. This
fear is self-defeating.
It is all one movement and will succeed as one movement at www.campdemocracy.org