From Ray Ybarra:

Someday children will be able to walk into a library and read about a period in history when thousands of migrants died attempting to unlawfully enter nation-states. The children will be appalled to read in this history book that there was once a time when human mobility across borders was not recognized as a human right. In the final chapter of the book, they will read about how the oppressed and disenfranchised across the globe organized to demand recognition of what was already known in their hearts. The time to write that final chapter is now.

For two years, I tracked anti-immigrant vigilantes through the desert along the U.S.-Mexico border. I met migrants who had blood coming out of their noses and purple masses where their lips used to be. I came upon migrants who were drinking their own urine to postpone death and saw mothers carrying their babies through the scorching, unforgiving terrain. I cannot forget the faces of people who were walking for days simply to find a job. I met mothers whose children died of dehydration and spent countless hours trying to conceive of a solution to the human rights tragedy created by borders. After many discussions with migrants, from rural communities in Mexico, to the border, and in communities across the United States, I kept hearing the same phrase: Tenemos un derecho humano a cruzar fronteras, translated, We have a human right to cross borders.

. . . Challenging the assumption that the rights of countries to regulate migration are superior to our rights as human beings to cross borders is long overdue. Now is the time for migrants and their allies to share their experiences, hopes, and aspirations, and to stop tailoring the discourse to sound appealing to the oppressors.

Past social movements provide examples of individuals asserting their rights despite immoral laws. Rosa Parks knew she possessed the right to sit anywhere on the bus. Before the passage of the 19th Amendment, Susan B. Anthony knew that women possessed the right to vote. Similarly, we must now turn to those who are most profoundly affected by immoral and inhumane immigration policies to lead us by example. Let us bury the notion that migrants are simply economic victims who need activists to be their voices. Every footstep in the desert can be considered an act of civil disobedience by visionaries paving the way for a movement for equality, liberty, and freedom. Migrants across the world cross international boundaries because they know that mobility is a human right. They have already provided the leadership—now it is time to identify followers.

— Ray Ybarra, Movement Vision Lab (2007-11-25): Crossing the Border: Human Mobility as a Human Right

Read the whole thing.

Right on. My only caveat — the only thing that I’d want to change — is to suggest, instead of act of civil disobedience, to view independent border crossings as direct action. Immigrants aren’t crossing borders in order to get arrested, or to challenge the morality of government border laws; they are crossing borders in order to find homes and jobs — to get the things they need in their lives, even without the approval of coercive governments — in order to render the destructive violence and stupidity of government border laws simply irrelevant to the lives that they lead. Not because political actors have been challenged to the point that they are no longer willing to go on enforcing unjust border laws, but rather because the actions of the immigrants themselves, and those who stand in solidarity with them, have made them unable to go on enforcing unjust border laws, even if they wanted to.

See also:

• GT 2007-11-12: Sin Fronteras

In response to the racist hate imagery at Halloween party, Auburn University has revoked its recognition of the local chapter Delta Sigma Phi [AU], and the national board of directors of Delta Sigma Phi voted to dissolve the local chapter. The University also withdrew its recognition of the local chapter of Beta Theta Pi, which had already been dissolved by its national board. Disciplinary action is still being considered for the individual students involved.

The Southern Poverty Law Center gave a presentation on building diversity and fighting hate on campus, which about 100 people attended. Meanwhile, well after we are done purging the people involved in this particularly heinous act of racism, the broader context of overt bigotry and structural racism in our community, the context that the administration is doing everything to distance itself from. And no wonder: they are an overwhelmingly white Good-Ol’-Boy administration which remains under a court desegregation order to recruit more Black students and faculty, and which has had a federal discrimination suit filed against it by Black workers in the Facilities Division. If we draw attention to the broader context of racism in the Auburn community, they are implicated.

I have been returning again and again to the theme that the Auburn community as a whole is accountable for fostering and enabling these images. Indeed, as images, no matter how cruel and horrific, they are actually not even as bad as the economic and political structural racism that continues to afflict our community. However, I want to thank Southern Poverty Law Center for pointing out again that this is not a problem unique to Auburn, and it’s especially not a problem unique to the Deep South. Note their list of known hate incidents on campus. Note that, despite what anti-Southern defensive bigotry would make many assume, Northerners and Westerners are all over this list: California, New York, and Massachusetts all have more incidents than Alabama or Mississippi. Hey, guess what, virulent racism is not limited to those of us who speak with a drawl. If we continue to delude ourselves and scapegoat a demonized South, we not only undermine the real accountability that the rest of our country needs to take, we are also going to ruin the hopes for change in the South: the more the problems of the South are treated as a unique problem, as long as we are led to believe that the South is nothing but irredeemible maleducated bigots, poverty, and Right-wing zealots in unfliching control of it all, as long as we are led to believe that as soon as you cross the Mason-Dixon line it all gets better… the more we make progressives and radicals, those of us who might fight to build a social justice infrastructure in the South, just want to get the hell out to the supposed utopia outside of ol’ Dixie. We lose 90% of our potential for change from people just giving up and moving out. Meanwhile, the progressive community in the North, caught up in the nonsensical belief that most of its problems are already solved, falls into stagnation and complacent lifestylism. Well, listen up y’all: if there is hope for anywhere, there must be hope for the South. Nowhere else is there a part of the country which has had to so thoroughly and so constantly confront its own history of sexism, racism, classism, homophobia. We are the birthplace of Frederick Douglass, the Grimké sisters, Harriet Tubman, Lucy Parsons, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., the home of SNCC and SCLC and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Our task has to be to unite and build a social justice infrastructure in the South, not to cripple our efforts by invoking class prejudice against rednecks.

For further reading:

• GT 11/14/2001 Auburn chapter of Beta Theta Pi dissolved, and commentary on the moral crippling of laid-back liberalism
• GT 11/9/2001 the broader context of racism in Auburn
• GT 11/6/2001, the original report on the Halloween blackface incident
• I come to realize my Southernness at a Northern school
• GT 3/16/2001 More on anti-Southern prejudice and elitist Northern faux liberals
• GT 7/27/2001 Southern Girls Convention works to build radical infrastructure in the South