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Mújica: From marches to immigration reform
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The man most responsible for putting 400,000 people on the streets of Chicago March 10, 2006 to march for fair immigration reform helped two Call To Action audiences clear up some common misconceptions about immigrants. Among other things, Jorge Mújica said:
• If you have ever moved from one place to another to improve your life, strictly speaking you are an immigrant. Thousands left New Orleans after Katrina. One million were recently evacuated from their homes in California during the wildfires. We make a huge issue of whether you leave a country, but enforcing national boundaries so fiercely is pretty recent in human history — and pretty arbitrary.
• Current U.S. immigration enforcement is loaded with inconsistencies and unfairness. Trying to immigrate to the U.S. from Uruguay? You’ll wait a couple of years. From Mexico? Seven to 14 years. From Korea? 24 years!
• The current hysteria against the undocumented immigrant (the legal term, much more derogatory, is “illegal alien”) is concentrated against Mexico. (Racism?) Hence the proposed wall or fence, which, if built, will be the most expensive public works project in human history.
• Definition of a citizen: An immigrant with seniority.
• A wall or fence is irrelevant to 50 percent of the people who enter, or remain in, the U.S. illegally. They didn’t enter on the ground. They flew.
• Former Gov. Pete Wilson of California tried to pass Proposition 187 in the mid- 1990s. It would have denied ALL public services to any undocumented person. No health care. No school. Not even a ride on a school bus. The initiative has recently been copied in Oklahoma, Colorado, and is being proposed in 1,400 states, counties and cities across the U.S.
• After 9/11, immigrants were blamed for attacking or menacing American lives. But most of the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were in the U.S. legally!
• If Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) had gotten H.R. 4437 to become law in 2006, anyone in the U.S. without proper papers (now an “administrative fault” but not a crime) would have been guilty of a federal crime, and anyone who helped such a person in any way to enter or stay illegally (gave a job, a room, a meal, a ride, a glass of water) would also commit a federal crime! Estimates are that this would criminalize 40 million people!
• Jorge’s favorite placard or sign in the immigration marches was the one which read: “I am not a criminal alien. I am the cook in your favorite restaurant.”
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