Nicholas Espíritu was EJS's 2006-07 Judge Constance Baker Motley Civil Rights Fellow

On July 31, 2007, the Equal Justice Society, along with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) put on a standing room only community forum at the Oakland Museum on the issue of "Immigration and the Black Community: Conflict or Common Interest?" The event was co-sponsored by Latino Issues Forum, Greenlining Institute and Centro Legal de la Raza.

With the Immigrant Rights mobilizations in the spring of 2006 being hailed as “a new civil rights movement,” it is important to understand how immigration relates to other civil rights struggles.  Particularly, what is the relation between the African American and immigrant communities and their respective claims for social justice?  Are they necessarily in conflict with each other, or is there an opportunity for collaborative work that will benefit both communities. Are there existing models  to deal with these challenges? What work still needs to be done to further social justice for these communities?

EJS brought together a panel of leading voices in the San Francisco Bay Area related to immigrants rights, civil rights and social justice: Larisa Casillas of the Bay Area Immigrants Rights Coalition, Reverend Phil Lawson of BAJI, Nora Vargas of Latino Issues Forum, Eva Paterson of EJS, and Professor Bill Ong Hing of the UC Davis School of Law. Each contributed a unique perspective on how to understand the concept of just immigration policy, and helped shed light on how it relates to the ongoing struggle for social justice for the African American community.

The panel was kicked off by members of Lucha Unida del Jornalero, a grassroots day laborer advocacy group in Oakland who were heading off that night to a national meeting of day laborer organizers.  They shared their experiences as day laborers, providing concrete context to the topics of the evening.

(From left) Rev. Phil Lawson, Larisa Casillas and Bill Ong Hing

Larisa Casillas spoke first, highlighting the various ways in which the immigrant community is under attack: most pertinently, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and the resulting climate of fear. She also highlighted the many ways in which anti-immigrant activities and rhetoric at national, state and local arenas have created the de jure exclusion and subordination of immigrant communities.

These have taken a number of forms that are often eerily reminiscent of Jim Crow laws. Anti-immigrant activities have included bans on renting residences to undocumented immigrants, minutemen patrols, voter intimidation and fraud, attempts to deny undocumented children access to college and universities, and renewed calls to overturn Plyler v. Doe and deny free primary and secondary education to undocumented children.  There have even been calls to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants. 

Reverend Phil Lawson spoke next, highlighting the interconnectedness of the immigrant and African American struggles and their linkages to global economic forces.  Reverend Lawson pointed out that issues related to immigration cannot be understood separately from transnational economic conditions such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which contributed to large-scale displacement of traditional rural communities throughout Mexico. NAFTA is just one piece of an overall trend in which juridical and economic régimes create a world in which capital flows ever freer, having the effect of uprooting populations.

Reverend Lawson also pointed out that just as questions of immigration are intrinsically linked to globalization, so too are issues of social and economic justice for the disenfranchised population in the United States.  By demonstrating the ways these economic policies have also harmed African Americans, BAJI helps create an understanding of the reasons African Americans are experiencing vulnerability and displacement. At the same time they are hoping to help African Americans understand the experiences of immigrants by engaging in activities such as taking delegations of African Americans to the U.S.-Mexico border to understand the conditions that immigrants face when making an unauthorized entry to the United States

Eva Paterson (left) and Nora Vargas

Nora Vargas talked about the need to work toward collaborative solutions for public policy issues.  She pointed out that many of the issues facing the immigrant and African American communities are the same: issues such as access to water, technology, and healthcare.  Vargas pointed out that while these are not zero sum issues, unless there is communication about shared needs, there will not be any gains.  She also proposed that issues of interest to immigrants, Latinos, and African Americans are fundamentally one of human rights and economic justice.

Eva Paterson began with a personal account of her feelings of displacement resulting from the increase in immigrant populations, articulating how these feelings of exclusion are intertwined with the lack of communication between immigrant and African American communities.  She talked about the need to open up the lines of communication so that real issues and tensions can be dealt with, including tensions that would be eased by understanding shared struggle, but also how sometimes there are real conflicts, and how to manage those.  Paterson also talked about the need to understand these issues as racial issues, and how the concept of the immigrant is racialized.  She pointed out that when we talk about immigrants we understand them to be brown people from the global south, and not the undocumented immigrants from Canada and Ireland.

Finally, Professor Bill Ong Hing discussed the way in which immigration law has always been and continues to be a racially exclusionary project.  He discussed the ways in which it has in the past relied on explicit racial and national exclusion, up until the present day in which proposed immigration “fixes” serve the function of continuing the use of immigration law to exclude particular racial groups.  He highlighted the way in which the proposed limitations on family reunifications act as a bar for certain immigrant groups.  He also pointed out that African American members of the congressional subcommittee on immigration vociferously opposed this change, noting that Congresswoman Maxine Waters likened the proposed limitation on family based immigration to the division of families that occurred during slavery.

At the end of an hour and a half panel discussion there was limited time for audience questions.  There was one particularly striking comment by an African American woman from New Orleans who talked about the phenomenon of displacement that is occurring in African American communities, and how that relates to tensions with immigrant communities.  Her statement seemed to capture the essence of what the forum was trying to confront: the reality that both immigrant and African American communities are under attack but how to understand that attack and how to do something about it remains an open question.  The concept of the “Right to the City” is one that has become a central focus of social justice organizing throughout the world, most recently through the World and United States Social Forums.