Ain’t Just Arizona: Obama the Deporter
Posted by Mike E on May 21, 2010
by Mike Ely
Arizona has become a lightening rod of anger — from those who hate the persecution of immigrants. That is a good thing — an exciting and much needed jolt!
But we all need to ask whether there should also not be much more attention on those actively doing the deporting: I.e. the Obama Administration.
We should ask ourselves if there isn’t some conscious and calculated misdirection involved in the Democratic establishment denouncing specifically a very mean-spirited Arizona law (passed by Republicans), while their team (which after all has power!) has escalated the deportations nationally.
Let’s be clear on a key point:
The White House accuses the Arizona law of unjustly profiling Latinos who are legal — while they themselves escalate the deportation of those who are illegal.
Is that a stand we want to take? No.
We want to stand up precisely for the rights of the undocumented — to demand their legalization. To demand an end to their persecution.To welcome their bold participation in this society. To demand their right to speak and live — and yes have political power. To expose the injustice of combining capitalist exploitation in the fields and sweatshops with street persecution by police and ICE agents.
Sure: there is “collateral damage” as this system attacks the undocumented.
Yes, it means that Latinos generally are insulted and humiliated by police, and yes that will accelerate in Arizona because of their fascist law. Those who are legal face the awful humiliation of being stopped by racist police. But for those who are illegal — that police stop and humiliation is far too often just the beginning of a true nightmare.
The larger injustice here is the deportation of undocumented working people, the daily terror this causes them and their families, and the much larger social impact of having a whole tier of the working class living in a shadow world of illegality.
We should be clear: We oppose police harassment of people who haven’t broken the law. But we are also raising our voices specifically against the treatment of those who have broken the immigration law. A corrupt and unjust law encouraging the constant super-exploitation of millions of workers in restaurants, hotels, fields, construction sites and sweatshops.
We must rise to defend the undocumented workers — the very ones who this administration is rushing to persecute.
Urge conventions to boycott Arizona? Sure. Let’s welcome and support the brave immigrant youth who are standing up in Arizona — walking out of their high schools, then risking arrest and deportation to call us all into action.
But let’s not fall for a cynical election-year strategy that focuses only there in Arizona and that often focuses mainly on the racial profiling of citizens and legal residents. And that leaves the true crimes of this administration, this government and this larger exploitative system unchallenged.
Deportations continue in Texas, California, Iowa, North Carolina, Illinois, Washington DC and a few blocks from where you live. Millions live in terror of a police encounter. And the deportations are accelerating.
* * * * * *
the following is from the Huffington Post
Little Girl Who Challenged First Lady Is Right:
Obama Is Deporting More Immigrants Than Ever
A little girl became the face of the nation’s immigration debate on Wednesday, when she told First Lady Michelle Obama about her mother’s fear.
“My mom … she says that Barack Obama is taking everybody away that doesn’t have papers,” the second-grader said after being called on by the first lady, who was visiting a suburban Maryland school with Mexico’s First Lady Margarita Zavala.
And when Michele Obama replied by describing the need to make sure “that people can be here with the right kind of papers,” the girl simply responded quietly: “But my mom doesn’t have any.” (Watch the video below.)
The girl’s guilelessness and innocence, in contrast to the inchoate rage of the anti-immigrant movement — and even to the first lady’s suddenly hollow-sounding talking points — could well turn her into an icon as immigration makes its way to the front of the national agenda.
But surely she was wrong, in suggesting that President Obama is a particular danger to undocumented immigrants? Perhaps she was confusing him with the governor of Arizona or something?
Well, actually, it turns out the little girl was right. Obama’s Department of Homeland Security has been deporting more undocumented immigrants than President Bush’s ever did.
The number of deportations each year more than tripled during the Bush era — and has kept going up since then. During fiscal year 2009, the first fiscal year of the Obama era, 387,790 immigrants were deported — almost 100,000 more during the last full fiscal year of the Bush presidency.
Department of Homeland Security officials stress one big difference between Bush and Obama policies: that the percentage of convicted criminals among the deportees is rising dramatically.
In fiscal year 2008, 31 percent of the 369,221 deportees had criminal records. From October of 2009 to late April of 2010, that figure was up to 48 percent.
Frank Sharry, the executive director of the pro-immigration group America’s Voice, credits Obama with “one significant rollback” relative to the Bush years, “which was of high-profile workplace raids.”
But, Sharry said, Obama’s record is a far cry from what many of his supporters were expecting. “It’s remarkable that Barack Obama as a candidate spoke so movingly about how our enforcement priorities were wrong — and now he’s exceeded the Bush administration level,” Sharry said.
Sharry’s group is out with a visual depiction of the deportation rate:
The final bar, representing the projections for fiscal year 2010, is the subject of some contention, however. It’s based on an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo published by the Washington Post in February. In the memo, James M. Chaparro, the agency’s head of detention and removal operations, told field offices to step up their deportations, particularly of “non-criminal aliens” — and he disclosed that the agency had a goal for FY2010 of deporting 400,000 immigrants, 250,000 of whom, or 62 percent, were expected not to have committed any crimes.
That would be up yet another 3 percent over last year. But ICE has since withdrawn that memo, however, saying portions did not reflect actual policies.
And the actual numbers of deportations for October 2009 through the end of April — about 186,000 — suggests that the total for fiscal year 2010, which ends five months from now, could turn out to be lower than last year’s.
observer said
Good article. Yes, oppose the “show me your papers” racist Arizona law, but also demand stop the deportations, abolish ICE and Border Patrol, and open borders.
eric ribellarsi said
We need to raise the stakes, thanks for this great piece, I reposted this on the FIRE site.
sks said
I was at an event around this, and this is the generalized feeling among base organizations around immigration. Obama the deporter indeed.
Mike E said
How do we break through on this?
First, it is extremely positive that Arizona is being demonized. And it is revealing that the Sarah Palin’s of the world are declaring “We are all Arizonans.”
So in some senses, a line has been drawn.
At the same time, this is a line connected to very bourgeois politics — and specifically to the November congressional elections. (And if this is not obvious to you, say so, and we will dig into this further).
This is an example of the system itself “dragging people into political life.” And what the people then do and think is then up for grabs.
We want to encourage the popular outrage over Arizona. We want to support the outbreaks of struggle and partisanship.
But we don’t want the whole to be confined to the terms of bourgeois politics (which respects the law, upholds the deportation of the undocumented, and ends with the election as the endgame).
How do we walk that complex walk in a creative way? Thoughts?
Greg McDonald said
Great article Mike!
morris the moose said
It ain’t just Arizona, because bills similar to SB 1070 are progressing through legislatures in many other states, 17 of them according to one count.
No disagreement with this article where it argues for a focus on defending the rights of the undocumented (as a part of going “lower and deeper”) and on exposing the role of this administration (as a part of exposing the US state and the system as a whole).
But, at the same time, SB 1070 needs to be understood as an attack on the entire Chicano, Mexicano, and indigenous peoples. The documented who get profiled are not simply the “collateral damage” of an attack aimed primarily at the undocumented; and within the undocumented, at undocumented workers in particular.
It becomes clear that SB 1070 is an attack on entire nationally oppressed peoples in the Southwest, documented and undocumented, when it seen in the context of the other policies that have been passed recently in Arizona, banning ethnic studies and preventing teachers who speak with an accent from teaching English. The Arizona superintendent of schools has said himself that the ethnic studies ban was formulated and will be implemented with the direct objective of singling out and eliminating the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American Studies Department.
These policies also have to be seen against the background of the history of US settler-colonialism in the Southwest, even after the consolidation of the US as an imperialist state. The practices that constituted “US settler-colonialism in the Southwest” have to be identified. The role of their survivals today in the economics, politics, and ideology of the US social formation have to be analyzed.
These policies are indeed being driven by the electoral cycle and by the attempts of the Republicans to win elections by whipping up racist sentiments (for example, the superintendent of schools and main figurehead for the campaign to ban ethnic studies is running for state attorney general). However, it is kind of reductionist to view the policies mainly as a distraction from the “larger injustice” of deportation. This approach seems to flow from an oversimplified theoretical understanding of the state, asserting that all fundamental decisions are made outside of the electoral arena (inside executive agencies like ICE), while the purpose of the electoral arena is simply to distract from these decisions or to legitimize these decisions with the illusion of a popular mandate. The purpose and function of the electoral arena, and its relation to what is at the core of the state, seems to be complex.
nando said
Morris writes:
I agree that it is worth understanding more deeply the motives here on various sides. And certainly we need to more and more clearly understand what is wrong with a reductionist view of the state (where its operations are seen as the result of some more or less unified ruling class collusions, and electoral jostling is seen as mere charade).
I don’t think anyone thinks Arizona is a distraction. It has emerged as an outrage and as a sharp focus of struggle. And the rise of resistance (on May first, in Phoenix schools, and in many other places) is extremely important.
And it is an example of how it is often the actions of oppressors who “drag the oppressed into political life.”
And yes, the games being played here involve the congressional elections — on both sides — where Republicans (in some states) want to rally a nativist force, while the Democrats seek to exploit that to draw Latino votes to themselves.
But the facts is that both parties have been involved in deporting the undocumented. And we should not let that slip from the table.
The resistance of the youth has been focused on the injustice of persecuting the undocumented (as the recent sit in of undocumented students highlights).
But meanwhile the expressions of the Democratic establishment have focused largely on one aspect of the Arizona impact — that DOCUMENTED Latinos will be profiled.
We need to welcome and participate in the resistance over Arizona — but not in a way that unconsciously adopts the Democratic establishment’s blindspots, or that allows them to escape exposure. They too are a target and part of the problem.
And part of the issues had to do with the discussion of law.
The rightwing nativists constantly say “enforce the law.” they rant that the undocumented have broken the law. they scream that this is a country of laws, and that those who break the laws are criminals etc. They demand that state governments and local police “enforce the laws” — if the Federal authorities are not aggressive enough at doing so. And (as part of this landscape) the Democrats are now in charge of enforcing those laws, and have stepped up that enforcement at the federal level.
And we need to step into that scene, and raise a clear statement that this is an unjust law — that breaking it is not a crime, and enforcing it is not justice. We need to say that it is wrong to enforce unjust laws, and it is right to defy them. this is a point that large numbers of people are trying hard to articulate, and that is NOT reflected in the bourgeois political arena (though it is said in some Catholic circles active in immigration reform).
The right says “amnesty rewards lawbreaking….” when they really are just expressing their “fear of a brown planet.”
The democrats insist (as Michelle Obama did) that they must enforce the law until the law changes — and then they (rather quietly) point out that the bourgeois political allignments don’t allow them to change the law right now.
We should help people step back and see Arizona in the larger context. No one argues that it is a distraction. We should just understand that it is being used as a political football by bourgeois forces who often are all participating in the harsh day to day oppression and exploitation of the people.
morris the moose said
Nando wrote:
Things may be more complicated that this. The recent sit-in was focused in particular on demanding the passage of the DREAM Act. This single action was praised by an editorial in the New York Times, while the broader student resistance in Arizona in the form of walkouts and other acts of civil disobedience went unmentioned.
While it is true that Democrats have been focusing on the profiling of documented people in Arizona and failing to defend the rights of the undocumented (this piece is a needed exposure of that), this doesn’t mean that they are opposed to pathways to legalization on terms that further polarize immigrant communities along lines of relative privilege and ultimately reinforce the system.
It is important to consider the debate within the immigrant rights movement regarding the military enlistment provision of the DREAM Act and to ask whether the interests of the most exploited and oppressed sections of undocumented youth, who do not have the resources to fulfill the 2-year community college requirement and for whom the only real option for legalization under the DREAM Act will be military enlistment, are reflected in the current campaign to pass the act (even while upholding the courage of the youth who are stepping out at this point).
The Democratic establishment will likely intervene in Arizona not only by trying to get votes in the upcoming elections, but also by attempting to narrow the political scope of the developing mass actions as much as possible, towards limited objectives such as the passage of the DREAM Act and away from the struggle by oppressed peoples for full democracy.
Mike E said
Morris:
I was struck (watching video of the sit-in) that their actions were so tightly focused on the DREAM act. Does anyone know who organized this action? Who is mobilizing people to demand this DREAM act — rather than focusing on a general amnesty?
This does seem to be tailored to draw in the second generation, college track immigrant youth — in a way that can separate them from the more newly arrives and less mobile among the undocumented people.