Sanctuary: In a Great
American and International Tradition
Dan La Botz
I was asked at a
recent meeting of the NYC DSA Immigration Justice Working Group to say a few
words to put our work in historical context and then asked me to write up my
brief talk, because it might be useful to others. – DL
Our sanctuary work is in a great national and global
tradition of humanitarianism and it is consistent with our social
internationalist principles. Our work, while fighting for the reform of the
immigration system, has as its goal the abolition of the capitalist system that
causes involuntary mass migration. And while using existing law to defend
immigrants and fighting for better laws, we stand opposed to the concept of the
national state, which will never respect and defend immigrants as equals in our
society.
We are at present working with the New Sanctuary Coalition
in New York City. New Sanctuary’s method is—while never telling anyone to do
anything illegal—to organize immigrant communities, the documented and the
undocumented, to protect each other. In each community a place of worship is
identified (a church, temple or mosque) as the local safe place. While places
of worship have no special legal protection, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) is reluctant to raid such places because it will outrage the
community and lead to bad publicity. Other places such as local business are
also asked to become sanctuaries in an emergency and to refuse to open their
doors except if there is a judge-signed warrant.
Working with the community, we in New Sanctuary, some of us
immigrant ourselves, teach immigrants methods to protect themselves such as
always showing a New York City ID, declining to offer information and avoiding
revealing one’s birth place, speaking in one’s native language, and going
inside one’s home and locking the door, opening it only if the authorities
present a warrant signed by a judge. We ask: If you don’t need to have a
passport, which is evidence of foreign birth, why keep it? If at some future
date a passport is needed, one can go to the consulate and apply for a new
passport. Legal techniques like these protect immigrants. Teaching these
techniques we build community organization, political consciousness, and a
movement of resistance to injustice.
A Great American
Tradition
As I said, in doing this work we in the Immigrant Justice
Working Group (IWJG) are in a great American tradition We can find the roots of
a sanctuary movement in the Undergound Railroad organized by people such as
Harriet Tubman which rescued black Americans from slavery and moved thousands
of them to the North and then to Canada and to freedom. After the passage of
the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, abolitionists lobbied for and passed personal
liberty laws and activists organized to rescue runaway slaves from
slave-catchers and federal marshals. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sanford decision (1857), upholding the right of
slave-owners to take their slaves in and out of free states only further
enraged abolitionists, who continued to resist the U.S. government’s unjust
laws.
In the 1980s, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the
United States government, working with rightwing forces in the region, carried
out a war against the left in Guatemala and El Salvador and worked to overthrow
the government of Nicaragua. The war displaced tens of thousands. Rightwing
paramilitaries issued death warrants and carried out the assassination of
leftist organizers. In Guatemala entire indigenous communities were targeted
for extermination and thousands were killed. Thousands, then tens of thousands,
fled to the United States, but not all were welcome. In response American
churches, both Catholic and Protestant, organized a new underground railroad
that brought undocumented immigrant activists or victims into the country and
hid them, moving some on to Canada later. One of our Brooklyn DSA members
provided sanctuary to one such person in that period.
A Great International
Tradition
Our sanctuary work is also in a great international
tradition. New Sanctuary’s method could be characterized as “non-cooperation,”
that is, declining to cooperate with the immigration authorities.
Non-cooperation, which may also become civil disobedience, has its roots of
course in American Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay “On Civil Disobedience,”
an essay and an idea was taken up by Mohandas K. Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of
the Indian independence movement from the 1920s to the 1940. Indians refused to
cooperate with the British in any way, while calling for independence. A
movement at the origin of the non-cooperation tradition.
Non-cooperation was taken up in 1960 by Nelson Mandel and
the African National Congress (as well as by he rival Pan-Africanist Congress),
which organized an anti-pass campaign against the government’s requirement that
black people carry passes. Mandela himself publicly burned his pass, for which
he was imprisoned for five months, only part of his longer struggle and later
decades long imprisonment. In doing our sanctuary work, we put ourselves in
this tradition.
A few years ago my wife Sherry and I visited France and met
with activists of the Rêseaux de
éducation san frontières, the Education without Borders Network. Leftist
high school teachers at the Jean Jaurès publc high school in Paris were the
original organizer of the network. (Jaurès was, by the way, the principal
leader of the Socialist Party in France at the beginning of the twentieth
century.) They began to organize to protect the African and Arab and mostly
Muslim children of their schools from deportation. They were not the first
children be snatched from schools.
In France on many older school buildings you will see black
marble plaques with gold lettering that remember and honor the Jewish students
who were taken from the schools by the Nazis during the World War II occupation
of France. The plaques typically say something like, “To the memory of the
children – students of this school, deported from 1942 – 1944 because they were
born Jewish.” The teachers of the network said, “Never again,” and organized to
protect their Arab and African students. In France at the time the local
prefect of police was responsible for the deportation of the children, so when
the teachers got word or a possible deportation they would speak to the
parents, offering to hide and protect their child until the network could
pressure the local prefect not to deport the child. We joined them at a rally
in Versailles to protest against a French airline for having fired a pilot who
refused to fly such children back to their countries. We in the IWJG place
ourselves in this tradition.
Capitalism the Source
of the Problem
We work in the New Sanctuary Coalition with Latino or
Haitian churches and other community groups who may not share our socialist
analysis. As over time we get to know the leaders and activists in these
communities we should let them know that we are socialists and what socialism
means for us. We should be frank that we see capitalism and the capitalist
government as the problem.
Capitalism is the cause of migration. For the last 150 years
or more capitalist economic development and capitalist booms and busts have
ruined the lives of millions of peasants and worker, forcing the to leave their
countries in search of jobs and higher wages elsewhere. Capitalism and its
imperialist wars have been another major cause of migration, though more
recently drug cartels (the capitalism of contraband) and their violence have
been perhaps a greater contributor to migration. And, finally, now we have
climate change with rising waters in lowlands and higher temperatures
everywhere making it impossible for some—and soon for many—to stay home.
We in DSA see immigrants simply as people who like ourselves
who need a place to live, a way to make a living, and a decent life. We see
most of the immigrants as coming to form part of our increasingly ethnically
diverse working class. We are proud to join them in the fight for reforms to
protect their communities from attack. As socialists we welcome them to join us
in the struggle to end capitalism and in the fight to create an altogether
different kind of government, a government of and for working people. We are
happy to join with them and we welcome them to join with thus. That too is part
of our great tradition.
Dan La Botz is a member of Solidarity and of the Democratic
Socialists of America and a co-editor of New Politics.
reposted from Democratic Left
No comments:
Post a Comment