From Immigrant Solidarity Team: November 26, 2021
On October 27, the Immigrations Solidarity Team showed the film La Bestia, a documentary following a number of Latin American migrants who try to reach the United States by riding Mexico’s railroads, followed by a panel of Oscar Chacon of Alianza Americas and Charlotte Jones-Carrol, chair of Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice.
Current US immigration policy toward Latin American immigrants, essentially unchanged since the 1940s, creates roadblocks to that immigration, but migrants continue to find ways around the roadblocks. Oscar argued that our best approach is to try to address the intolerable circumstances in the home countries, which are the root of the migration. More migrants are coming in family groups and even unaccompanied minors, people who often travel in “caravans”, or even on buses, who are seeking to join families already in the States. One impact of the use of Rule 42, rejecting people on the relatively specious grounds that they represent a danger of covid infections, is that people turned back on those grounds do not face the potential 10 years’ bar that arises from legal deportations, so they continue to try to reenter.
Oscar argued that the gradual predominance of Latin Americans in migration patterns to the US was met from 1940 on with a concerted white supremacist campaign that migrants are dangerous. At the same time, he has noticed that Latin American migration tends to increase when jobs are more plentiful in the US. Thus, he argued, Latin American migration, and migration in general, is actually a net positive for the US economy and for wealth generation and even tax collection. Charlotte pointed out that the industries which are primarily reliant on migrants are hospitality, food preparation (including meat and poultry butchering), and agriculture. Migrants pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.
UUSJ is trying to address US immigration policies by lobbying Congress. Charlotte mentioned that several reasonable legislative proposals have been submitted to Congress, but that the only avenue that has any reasonable chance of progress is Dream Act reform. While that is a positive step, it addresses at most 700,000 people, while the undocumented population of the US is closer to 11 million. Oscar argued that the persistent negative campaign against Latin American immigrants has made immigration reform a toxic issue for Democrats, who fear that they will be defeated in the polls if they push for such reform.