The Weekly Undocument
The Weekly Undocument is a post done by blogger Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican. This will now by a syndicated piece on this blog.
The Weekly Undocument: The State of our Union is Sassy!
By Nezua
THE PRO-MIGRANT BLOGOSPHERE IS ALIGHT with talk of The 38 Words uttered in President Obama’s first State of the Union speech last night. Immigration advocates and activists alike were watching with baited Twitter client. Websites were liveblogging the SOTU. Obama was fill of spirit. At moments you felt hope rise that he’d hit it right. Or at least smack someone on the Right side of the aisle.
“Damn,” you said to yourself, beaming at the determined expression on Little Computer Screen Obama. “The way he is talking about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, he may just bring some of this fire to immigration reform!” And you waited for those words. You and your millions of Latino friends waited. (You have a big living room.)
But in the end, he sort of just slid it in under the wire. As Sandip Roy of New America Media writes, it seemed nothing more than a “casual platitude.”
“And we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system – to secure our borders, enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nations.”
12 million undocumented immigrants deserved more than those 38 words.
“Continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system.”
Does that imply that Congress or the White House have been already busy fixing our broken immigration system? Were they doing it during the rest breaks in the middle of health care reform gridlock? If so, I missed the memo.
Yes, it sounds like a punt, eh? A missed opportunity. It felt that way to me.
Maegan la Mala at VivirLatino.com points out another missed opportunity: that of connecting the health care reform issue to immigration reform, and breaks it down to the community level in her post The President’s State of the Union: Missed Opportunities on the Push for Immigration and Health Care Reform.
While I was preparing mentally for the State of the Union address, I saw on the Spanish language news about an immigrant mujer, Alexandra Nunez, who died from massive bleeding during an abortion in a clinic walking distance from Casa Mala. A single mother, like me, made a decision about her body and life within the limits placed on her because of law and who she is.
During the State of the Union speech, Obama spoke about the problems with getting health care reform passed and spoke on immigration from a law and order perspective, following the laws and securing the borders. He failed, as so many do, in pointing out where health care reform and immigration reform intersect, in the very lost life of mami Alexandra Nunez.
The “law and order perspective” is very popular with many politicians and right-wingers alike, when talk of immigration arises. Why is that? Probably because the notion of criminality and Latinos is linked nearly every day, in the mouths of many a mainstream pundit. (And immigrants today are thought of as only—and erroneously—Mexican!) Images are reinforced in movies and video games and magazines. To talk of numbers of brown people coming over the border is to provoke an anxiety that the mainstream US mind will often try to soothe with the placebo of a prison prescription.
In many cases there is just a straight-up divide in worldview and life circumstance. As a friend, Prerna (the organizing force behind DreamActivist) wrote during a post-SOTU discussion on a list-serv today:
There’s a lot of strategies and egos, but then there are also broken families, wasted lives, unfulfilled dreams that no amount of driving legislation forward can change because we don’t get back lost time. Talk is cheap, free actually, but some of us just have to make do with what we have, take matters into our own hands or move on to greener pastures.
Civil disobedience, occupying buildings FTW.
So the level of frustration is high. And yet the need for action will not wane.
Is it time to occupy buildings? How far to step up our presence and voice at this point?
Is immigration reform “dead in the water” as some DC sources lament? Not at all, counter others. What is to be done? We’ll come back to that.
(more…)


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