Podcast: Xenophobia, Resistance, and the Future of the Immigrant Rights Movement

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Hello, and welcome to this special episode of Who Belongs?, a podcast from the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. This episode is part of a series of talks and panel discussions recorded during the breakout sessions of our Othering & Belonging Conference that took place in Oakland this past April.

This session is titled Xenophobia, Resistance, and the Future of the Immigrant Rights Movement. It includes panelists Annette Wong, who is the Managing Director of Programs at Chinese for Affirmative Action, Karim Golding, who is the Founder of The Law Library, Lawrence Benito, who is the Executive Director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and Carlos Perea, who is the Executive Director of the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice. It was moderated by Tracy La, the Executive Director of VietRISE.

The panelists share lessons they learned from their years of organizing the immigrant rights movement, the changing phases of xenophobia in the context of migration, and stories of local communities challenging traditional notions of representation and belonging by winning the right to vote for non-citizens. The session was curated by Tracy La, OBI's Río González, and the OBI Network for Transformative Change. You can find more episodes from this series on our website at belonging.berkeley.edu/whobelongs.

Tracy La:
Good morning, everyone.

Audience:
Good morning.

Tracy La:
I'm sorry. Good morning, everyone.

Audience:
Good morning.

Tracy La:
I know you all just got really quiet and relaxed, but we really want you to be engaging with this session and with the speakers here today. So, I'm going to ask you all one more time, how are you all doing today?

Audience:
Good.

Tracy La:
I think you all are doing a little better than that. How are you all doing today?

Audience:
Great.

Tracy La:
Okay. Awesome. Cool. Good morning, everyone. Firstly, thank you so much for joining us for our session today on the last day of the conference. We have an amazing panel of speakers, of organizers, movement builders that I really, truly respect, who are based across the country. My name is Tracy La. I'm the Co-Founder and Executive Director of an organization based in Little Saigon, Orange County, called VietRISE. Has anyone here ever been to Little Saigon, Orange County before?

Audience:
Woo. Woo-hoo.

Tracy La:
Awesome. Okay, thank you for the excitement of whoever is having fun. All right. So, most of the room has not been there. Please, come. Please, reach out. We always love giving tours of Little Saigon.

For today, I'm wearing blue jeans and a white, buttoned-up shirt. My skin is like brown rice. I'm Southeast Asian, specifically Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Chinese, and I have long, dark, brown, wavy hair. I'm 5'3", but I wish I was 5'8". And that comment about my skin being like brown rice was actually a poem from an eight-year-old that was posted on Twitter.

This session is going to be an ambitious one, and by ambitious I mean, in just a little over an hour, we are going to talk about Xenophobia, Resistance, and the Future of the Immigrant Rights Movement in the United States. There's nothing wrong with being ambitious. I think we all need to be ambitious. I think our movements need to be very ambitious, and we need to recognize ambition as a strength and a core in our approach. Thank you.

Xenophobia as a strategy, xenophobia as an ecosystem, where the phases change but the war of attrition against migrant communities, that they wage on migrant communities, stays the same over decades, whether there is a Republican president or a Democratic president, it's all the same. We are also going to be discussing immigrant resistance movements, from defensive strategies like Defend DACA and cutting ties between local law enforcement and ICE, to offensive strategies built on the values of solidarity and belonging, like winning deferred action for labor enforcement, and expanding the right to vote to immigrants without citizenship. These are all things that our speakers are going to talk about, because they have been leaders in this movement.

For our session today, we are going to begin with short presentations from our incredible panelists, who I'm going to introduce right now, in order of who's closest left to me.
This is Karim Golding, yes. He is the Founder of The Law Library, where he helps both immigrants and US citizens with legal work, credit repair, and business credit building, while passionately advocating for systemic criminal justice and immigration reform. Please, give a welcome to Karim.

On his left is Lawrence Benito, he/him. He is the Executive Director at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. As Executive Director, he has overseen successful campaigns to pass landmark pro-immigrant policies at the state level, and has furthered his organization's standing as a national leader in immigrant rights organizing. Please, give a welcome to Lawrence. All right.

All right. Next to him is Carlos Perea. He is the Founding Executive Director of the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice. Born in Veracruz, Mexico, for nearly two decades, Carlos' work has focused on building the political power of undocumented, working-class immigrant communities in Orange County. Please, give a welcome to Carlos.
All right. Last, but not least, we have Annette Wong. Annette is the Managing Director of Programs at Chinese for Affirmative Action, where she oversees community initiatives that support marginalized and limited-English proficient Chinese migrants to be community and civic leaders, while also meeting everyday direct service needs. Please, give a welcome to Annette.

After these short presentations, we're going to go into a panel discussion, a quick Q&A. And then, if we have time, we have an interactive group activity, a small group activity. That's why there are easels on the side. And if you're on the tables, there are large pieces of paper in white. All right, so we're going to start actually with Carlos. I'm going to pass it down to you.

Carlos Perea:
Yeah. Thank you, and good to see everyone here. I love seeing smiling faces, and I saw a lot of you walking in with smiles. So, thank you. Thank you for that energy. I'm definitely very honored to be sharing a space with amazing folks here.

My name is Carlos Perea. My pronouns are him/his, and my visual description is, I am a 5'6" tall Mexican. Brown Mexican with short, spiky hair, and I have gray hair now on the sides. That's life. I'm wearing a coat, a dark gray coat, and wearing a shirt that stands with many, many, many different identities. LGBTQ, undocumented Black, and Native American Indigenous. Yeah, that's my short description.

I'm going to try to really go over the last 50 years. We know that xenophobia is not just something that has occurred recently. We know xenophobia has been ingrained since the founding of this country and the colonization and displacement of Indigenous people. But it's really in the last 50 years where we have seen the modern way in which we have seen xenophobia intersect with white nationalism and fascism. In many ways, the immigrant rights movement has seen this coming.

What we are seeing right now with the previous Trump Administration, the rise of white nationalism that has now got to the power in many states and at the federal level, it's something that the immigrant rights movement, we have foreseen for quite a while. And I'll say in a bit why. But first, I want to start with this guy right here. Anyone know him? Kris Kobach? This is a person you shouldn't forget.

Kris Kobach was a professor of law back in the early 2000s, and he published a paper called Attrition. In this paper, he made the case as to how to deal with the undocumented problem. Kris Kobach went on to become the Secretary of State in Kansas and was recently elected as Kansas Attorney General. Kris Kobach was the architect of SB 1070, show-me-your-papers law in Arizona. Anyone remember that? Yeah, there was mass mobilizations coming in solidarity with undocumented folks in Arizona. He was the architect of that. And he borrowed a lot from California. California recently had Proposition 187, the original show-me-your-papers law.

Folks, white nationalists are very smart on how they're architecting this. He specifically advocated for attrition against immigrants for self-deportation. Back then, this idea sounded wild. People, there is no such thing as conditions that can force people to self-deport. But they experimented. They tried and tested. They lost, but they won in many different states.

Here is the paper that he published called Attrition through Enforcement: A Rational Approach to Illegal Immigration. And this was published in 2008. In this one specifically, he said, "What if every illegal alien found it difficult to obtain employment in the United States and the risk of enforcement, including the possibility of detention during removal hearings, were to increase for all? Those new realities would dramatically alter behavior. Attrition through enforcement will occur."

That year, that made life so difficult for immigrants. Not just undocumented immigrants, they were going for all immigrants at that time, but to make it so difficult that folks will self-deport. Not only through policing, but wage economical warfare on immigrants by limiting how they can work through [inaudible 00:10:38], through other means. Limiting how immigrants could access public services that they pay taxes for, but hard to access public services. We heard that recently about the folks being potentially penalized for using public services if you were undocumented, public benefits. All that was laid out in 2008.

Anyone know this person? John Tanton? Another person, another face you shouldn't forget. This person is dead now, but left a very devastating legacy. John Tanton was a very rich, wealthy man, friends with very rich white men as well. And they founded the Tanton Network. This was a white nationalist architect of modern anti-immigrant movement. He changed the landscape of how anti-immigrants move in the nation. It went from being rhetoric to being policy, and to being about power and how to wield it.

He created a very highly network of influential organizations that many of those have heard, and I will go over them in a bit. But specifically, the idea was to turn white anxiety of the changing demographics in the United States into nihilism and hate and weaponizing it in many ways that we had never seen before. This is the John Tanton Network, which includes many organizations, which includes the Federation for Fair Immigration Reform, which has done long-lasting damage in many states and localities, by pushing anti-immigrant laws, similar to the paper that Kris Kobach published. Which, by the way, Kris Kobach worked for this guy.

What we're starting to see is that things did not happen by chance on this anti-immigrant wave in the last 50 years. They were manufactured, and there were architects behind it. Many people were like, "This is not going to happen." But they tried and tested until Trump got elected.

Now, let me share with you something that... A soft criticism with immigrant rights movement is that we have been on the defensive for 20, 30 years. But the anti-immigrants, the John Tanton Network, Kris Kobachs of the world, they have been on the offensive for a long time. We think about it, and this is an analogy that I learned from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network from Pablo Alvarado, a really amazing organizer and leader in the immigrant rights movement, and I do got to mention that when the undocumented immigrant youth movement was alone, fighting against the Democrat establishment for the DREAM Act in the early 2010s, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network was in the forefront there with us.

Because they understood that the most impacted people when it comes to undocumented immigrant status are the laborers. They are the ones that receive the brunt of the enforcement and racism and xenophobic policies in the United States before any of us feel it. They developed this analysis, this is their analysis, that the right has been on the offensive for 50 years in a multi-pronged war across all levels of government: at the federal, at the state, and at the local level, judiciary, executive, and legislative. Nationally, and we saw in Texas, Arizona, and federally, now we see with many, like Congressman Bass and former President Trump. And locally, locality by locality.

I'll end with this, is that the changing phases of xenophobia have looked like this. From the Bush Administration to Obama, to Trump, and Biden, right-wing political forces have been very effective in dominating the national discourse on immigration. They are two steps ahead of us. Republicans have not hesitated in wielding the power and implementing their agenda when elected to public office. Many legislators that are leading the fight in Congress against immigrants, many of the leading people that are advising this anti-immigrant elected officials as well, came from the John Tanton Network. They work for the John Tanton Network. This is not something that happened, again, by chance. It was manufactured.

Now, I'm going into the Democrats, which is the history of a peace man and compromise of Democrats with right-wing rhetoric, and their agenda have led to some of the most restrictive immigration policies in the country. And that's something that we will go more into in a bit. So, thank you.

Tracy La:
Thank you so much, Carlos. Next, we're going to have Lawrence speak on the "migrant" crisis and the divide-and-conquer strategy.

Audience:
Woo.

Lawrence Benito:
I have at least one fan in the back of the room. Thank you, Tracy. Again, Lawrence Benito. Pronouns, he/him/his. I am, visual description, a Filipino-American male in my mid-50s, bald with a beard, wearing a black shirt. And if my head gets cold, I'll put on this Belonging cap that's black and blue. Thank you all for being here. Yeah.

Carlos, I want to thank you for your presentation, because it leads on... Now, I can see why you went first. My slides are pictures of things that were... This one was from Twitter, and I was asked to talk a little bit about the migrant crisis. For me, and I think many folks, this is a manufactured crisis. And it's manufactured in that we know the way to resettle people. We have had successful ways of resettling people in the past. This is not one of them.

The current government has allowed Governor Abbott from Texas to dictate the terms of where and how and who is being sent on buses to all over the country, to cause maximum havoc. Chicago is a political decision, because we're going to be hosting the Democratic National Convention in August. Let's back up a little bit.

We started receiving buses in August of 2022. And from August to April, we worked with our partner organizations locally to help about 2,000 individuals, including 800 kids in about 20 hotels. 25 organizations. Fast-forward to November of 2023, and by that time, we had received over 19,000 people. There were over 3,500 people in police station floors, tents outside of police stations, and at O'Hare Airport, where we were getting two direct flights from Texas on a daily basis. In November, we had about 500 people curtained off in one part of O'Hare Airport.

Obviously, the attention paid to this, because people saw on a daily basis the people living outside of police stations, a lot of attention. I want to contrast that. Because now, we have resettled close to 39,000 people in Chicago. At the same time, we have resettled close to 40,000 Ukrainians, but Ukrainians have received almost zero media attention. They have been successfully integrated into various communities around the state without any fanfare, without any media. But Venezuelans, Black migrants on the streets of Chicago, have received daily attention. What's the difference here?

When we hear the crisis and we hear about the tensions, which are real, the tensions come about from the lack of a coordinated government response to something that, again, we have seen they are capable of doing. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement moves people around, sends them back. They are capable when they are willing to move people. But in the absence of that, the city and states are left to their own devices, to fend for themselves, come up with the money. In which, that creates this scarcity mindset, and has created situations in which, if you look at the City of Chicago, or when they were trying to figure out where can we house mass numbers of people? Well, where are the places that have large tracts of vacant land? It's on the South and West Sides of the city, which are predominantly Black neighborhoods.

That has created, then, tensions, for obvious reasons: communities that have been underserved, have been under-resourced for decades. Now, you have people that just arrived, and now you're trying to find places? Roll out the welcome mat, provide food, shelter, money? It just becomes a powder keg for raw emotion. And understandably so, with very little input, community input, about what the plan is. That's some of the dynamic that we've been dealing with as community organizers, trying to figure out how do we do right by folks? Can you go back to the...

This slide, if you go back to it, Carlos was saying about the John Tanton Network. At the height of the buses coming, there was a stop-the-buses rally, save Chicago from mass migration, that was sponsored by NumbersUSA, which is one of the John Tanton Networks. This happened in the heart of Englewood, on the South Side of Chicago, which is probably a neighborhood that is 95% Black. Sponsored by not only NumbersUSA, but an organization called Black-American Voters. This is what we're up against in terms of how xenophobia, the othering, starts to happen. It plays on people's anger, fears, frustrations.

But then, you have a known white supremacist organization then partnering with an organization that none of my Black-led organizing groups know, friends, know who Black-American Voters are as a group. But it gives this credibility to this forum. Right back, yeah, the Founder of NumbersUSA, a good friend of John Tanton, they gave him a microphone to speak at this event. We can go to the next slide. Yeah, that just... It infuriated me to see that level of partnership.

But it's not just the tensions between Black communities. Some of the hardest pushback came from... This was at a rally in Brighton Park. Mostly Latino neighborhood and a growing Chinese-American community. There's a lot of, "Hey, what about us? We've been here, undocumented for decades, and nobody has helped us get our papers for work authorization. These people just got here and now they've got work authorization and legal status to be here." That has created tension within immigrant communities. We are now seeing displacement of undocumented workers for these new workers that just got their permits, because they've got work authorization to be here. That is also working through some of those tensions. Is...

Carlos:
Working through some of those tensions is part of what we're trying to figure out with our base. And we've done, with OBI, some deep listening, bridging conversations on the doors, to get a better sense of, "Okay, where are people at? What are the things that are important to them?", as a way to figure out how do we bridge the conversations that we need to have with folks about how do we build a bigger we and fight for things that our communities need and deserve.

Lawrence:
I think two more similar slides. So, this was at a community forum in South Shore. Again, a Black neighborhood, mostly Black neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. You can see the visual sign that was up.

This was not under our current mayor. This was under the previous mayor. But this was at a local high school that was closed under Mayor Emanuel, and they wanted to use this school, the community wanted to use this school, for community centered approaches in a Black neighborhood.

The previous mayor, Mayor Lightfoot, wanted to use this, or made a decision that she wanted to use this school to house new arrivals. Again, without any community input, and that created real... There were over 600 people at this event. And people were furious, as you can imagine. Again, it was a decision made without any community input, and they were going to do it, regardless of what people had to say at this forum.

Again, I attended this one. I was there. It was not easy to hear some of the othering that was happening. People saying things like, "These people are coming here. They're bringing disease. They're bringing crime. They're part of gangs."

These are things that were said about Black folks earlier in our country's history. And to hear it mentioned again in these forums, as I was talking with other Black organizers that were at the event, that had a different story to tell in that moment, it was really difficult, in the heat of the moment, I think, for other people to hear an alternative narrative or perspective.

We had people prepared to say things in that, that were supportive, but I don't think they felt safe to be able to say that, the way that all the politics had already unfolded inside of that forum.

And I think that's, again, what's lost, and then media reinforces it, and then you see the stories the next day with the sign of, Build The Wall 2024, and all the anger and frustration, which again, we can understand.

Last one, again, this was on the north side of the city, where a very diverse community, and a mixture of progressive white folks, in addition to Asian, Latino. But again a lot of sentiment of, "We don't want this shelter in our backyard."

And so it really has made us take a step back to figure out, okay, we got to work both on narrative, but also on bringing folks together to understand some of the root causes of why people are coming, which are also related to our own foreign policy.

But at the same time, I think listening to people's immediate needs and what they're wanting for their communities as well.

So, that's some of the things that I wanted to highlight about some of the changing faces, but some of also the challenges and the opportunities that we face, and how this issue is playing out across our city.

Speaker 2:
Thank you so much, Lawrence.

All right. So, the first two speakers, Carlos and Lawrence, they laid out what we are up against. We know now it's not just ice, it's not just about abolishing ice, it's not just about Trump and getting a new president. It is an entire ecosystem. A web of economic, legal, political structures that all work together to make this system possible. All right.

So, we're going to hear now, next, from our next of speakers. First, Kareem is going to be talking about hustle and empowerment, crushing xenophobia with economic savvy.

Kareem Golden:
I probably won't use my slides. But just hearing the other two speakers speak, let me just introduce myself. My name is Kareem Golden. I use he/him pronouns. I'm Jamaican. I went through-

Audience:
Yeah.

Kareem Golden:
Thank you. So, I was incarcerated by the federal government, and convicted. Even though I overturned my convictions, I still have conviction about other things, about the law. And just having that experience.

So, I have to also describe myself, right? Things I hate. I'm wearing glasses, tacky Dickies with the law library imprint on it, because I've embodied living in the law library.
And let's get into it. So, how many of you in here hate lawyers? Right? Okay. How many of you in here practice law? Nobody practices law, right? So, that's not what I believe. I believe everybody practices law, every day of the week, here, now, contract and agreeing.

Just like the two gentlemen before me, they presented their case, and they proved it. So, that's how we have to approach the things in a society. We have to see what the agenda is, and legally approach those things.

With stuff like DACA, how that was attacked in Texas. Usually, every bill that's passed that's in favor of immigration reform is attacked in Texas by a sheriff, that is probably endorsed by tantum, or one of those individuals from Kansas.

So, how do we respond to that? How do we venue shop? How do we use the law to protect migrant rights? But also, the communities that are marginalized that have the effect? If you're putting migrants in certain communities, and creating this tension, how do we create community law? How do we build those contracts? How do we empower people with economics?

So, there are consumer laws that we're empowered by if we know them. Driver's license bills, things that are being passed to help and aid. And my approach, is we have to learn the law, we have to practice the law.

The applications for immigration, are just that, applications. They ask your name, your A-Number, information that you already have. But because of legalize and terminologies that we aren't familiar with, which is bad English, or whatever you want to call it, we are fearful.

They made the law a profession where we won't approach it. And we say, "We have to go hire somebody to do this job." Often times, those individuals aren't even equipped, and it's self-servant.

So, my approach is changing that by educating my communities on how to use the law. Yeah, that's why I won't use the slides.

So, some of the things. When asylum seekers come here, and the narrative is that they're illegals, but in order to seek asylum you have to be in the U.S. That's the law. So, it can't be illegal.

So, now, when you take those nine digit numbers for work authorizations that asylum seekers get after 180 days, they don't even have to realistically even wait that long. They're under parole supervision, so you can use supervision to apply. So, what I'm trying to do right now, is educate the people in the room on how to help each other.

Now, what happens is, when you leave it up to certain groups, as a migrant, when you come here, it's who helps you that you resonate with. And who you will work with and who you will partner with.

If you leave it up to certain groups to employ migrants, they will be exploited. So, you have business owners who are, if you're a business owner, you're using the law, because you have to register and you have to do legal things.

How do you employ migrants? How do you get the tax benefits? How to do those things. We have to start thinking in those terms, and using the migrants, so to speak, to build them up while we build ourselves up in these communities.

Because we have work to do against the agenda. So, if the agenda's telling you, "Well, migrants are bad for you", you have to now look at why is that being presented to you in that manner.

These agendas are 15 years old, 30 years old, 40 years old, 100 years old. They've been practiced in prison systems, slavery systems, and we have to acknowledge what they are, legally. And go to court about things like human trafficking. What Governor Abbott is doing, is human trafficking.

But we also have to look at why is that strategy being used, and why certain states are being targeted, and not all states are being targeted? Because all of this is strategic, because that's the legal mind of what we're doing.

The law says, "If the light is red, you stop." That's a strategy to create traffic and the normal flow of things. So, that's how I think about the law. Why is it being done? When am I supposed to stop? When am I supposed to use this policy against you, because it's being used against us?

So, I'm not going to present very long, because I just wanted to give answers on how to do things, and how to think, and go about approaching the law, so that we can be proactive instead of reactive to policies and law.

Speaker 2:
Thank you Kareem. Yesterday, we had a conversation about how our movements on the left often, for some reason, fear power. This idea of power, of having power. And we reject this idea of using their strategy against them, because it's going to corrupt us in some way or another. But we've got to be creative about it, and that's exactly what we're talking about.

All right. So, our last speaker, sorry, last presenter, is going to be Annette. She is going to be taking about resisting xenophobia through building power and belonging, and winning the right to vote for immigrant communities.

Annette:
Awesome, thank you. Good to see you all. So, my name is Annette. I'm the Managing Director of Programs at Chinese for Affirmative Action, located in San Francisco. And I'm a gender non-conforming, east-Asian person. I have shortcut hair, and I'm wearing glasses and a navy cardigan.

So, I really appreciate all of my fellow panelists, and what they've shared. Really also appreciate, Kareem, what you just shared about basically how are we using the system's tools that were set up to oppress us, to fight back, and create a more inclusive society.

I think what we've heard this morning, is not only is the system set up to exclude us, but it's actively being used to actually keep people out of meaningful participation, keep people unable to live and thrive in meaningful ways. And so how do we resist this setup?

Well, there are a myriad of ways. I'm just sharing one today. But I'm sure that if we asked every person in the room, there would be just as many different answers.

So, I was going to share a little bit about immigrant voting today. How many people in the room have heard about immigrant voting? We're talking about immigrant voting. We're talking about non-citizen immigrant voting. How many folks have heard of this? All right. All right, fire is spreading.

So, you know, it's called a lot of different things. Some places call it immigrant voting. Some folks call it local voting. Some folks call it municipal voting. But I think what we're talking about, is non-citizen immigrant voting.

And for some, it might feel like a very far-fetched idea, or it feels like an oxymoron, like, "How are you going to let non-citizens vote? It doesn't make any sense." But actually, for much of the nation's history, this was the norm.

So, let's see if my little... Oops, sorry, can I go back one, Teresa? Thank you.

So, this is a few maps of how immigrant voting has evolved over time in U.S. history. So, the cornflower, or the light bluish purple, is where immigrant voting was actually allowed. And the red areas are where it has been disallowed, had been disallowed.

So, it's actually very normal in the past to allow immigrants to vote. And that was because, historically, voting was not tied to citizenship. Now, it is very much, it's one of the core things that people talk about. It's like, "Oh, you've become a citizen, you get to vote, and you get to serve on jury duty, and other things."

But, historically, voting was actually tied to race, class and gender. And so if you were a white male property owner, you could vote. And in this kind of scenario, white male immigrants, immigrants from Europe, could buy property, and they could therefore vote. And this system allowed for the maintenance of the social hierarchy, because it continued to exclude women, people of color, in particular Black folks at the time, and poor people from voting.

So, as we look at the evolution, today, women can vote, people of color can vote, thanks to Black leadership and the Civil Rights Movement. Economic status is not a direct factor in voting rights, although we can all agree that in the last little while here, there have been several tactics that are used to essentially disenfranchise poor folks.

But somewhere along the line, throughout the years, immigrants stopped being able to vote. And that has to do with the rise in xenophobia, it had to do with increase in numbers of migrants coming from the global south.

As the complexion of immigrants got darker and darker, people started to feel more and more fear. People, the system, started to feel more and more fear. So, we want to bring that back.

It's not necessarily a new notion, it's actually something that has existed in the past. It probably got to the most restrictive point in the early half of the 1900s.

But actually in the '60s, New York brought back immigrant voting for school board elections. And it allowed it for about 30 years, but then eventually in the 1990s, New York moved to appointments, rather than elections for school boards, so no more voting for school board elections. But in the last 20, 30 years, there has been a resurgence of immigrant voting.

Currently, there are actually 17 jurisdictions that allow non-citizen immigrants to vote. In Maryland, there are 10 towns. Vermont, three towns. D.C., San Francisco, Oakland and New York.

New York passed the law, but there's actually a lawsuit that's on appeal right now, so they have not enacted their law.

And there are actually countless others that are considering immigrant voting. Oh, see, the list is so long, it got cut off. But in California alone, there are nine localities that are somewhere along the path of considering immigrant voting.

And I really want to give props to Carlos and Tracy, because they are leading probably the next campaign for the next city in California that will become, hopefully, fingers crossed, that will allow immigrants to vote. So, super excited for Santa Ana, keep it on the lookout.

In California, Santa Ana's close. It's going to be on the November ballot, so keep your eye out. Oakland, actually, right here in Oakland, the law passed a couple of years, a measure passed a couple of years ago, that would allow non-citizens to vote in school board elections, but it has not yet been implemented, so we're still waiting.

So, as you see, there's actually a few different... When we say immigrant voting, it actually means a lot of things. In New York City, immigrants can vote in municipal elections, but it's limited to documented individuals, documented immigrants. So, it's not everyone, but it's broader, in that it's municipal elections.

In San Francisco, documented and undocumented folks can vote, but it's limited to school board elections. And we're all really looking to Santa Ana, because Santa Ana's going for the gold. They're going for everyone municipal city-wide, which is really the most expansive version that we will have seen in California. So, that's something that we're very excited about.

And then there's also localities in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine and Illinois as well, that are considering immigrant voting.

But with all of these things, there also come a tax. The system is not just going to allow this to happen without any kind of push back.

So, in seven states, there are outright bans on immigrant voting. So, at the state level, there is legislation that's passed, or it's in the Constitution where localities cannot allow non-citizens to vote in municipal elections. So, those are the states listed there. I think some of those are probably no surprise.

And the other attack that we're seeing, is around lawsuits. So, localities, especially in major cities that are very well known, are facing a lot of lawsuits around immigrant voting to stop the implementation of immigrant voting.

I think the bottom three, Vermont, D.C., San Francisco, we have all been sued, and we've succeeded in our lawsuits. San Francisco actually just won in August of this past year. And New York, right now, New York actually lost their lawsuit, initially, just a couple of months ago, and the city is appealing. So, we'll see that continue.

I think the third kind of attack that we're seeing around immigrant voting, is really the larger discourse and narrative around immigrant voting. Especially the fact that it is being highly linked to the idea of stealing elections, which that narrative is only going to grow louder as we get closer and closer to November. So, that's one thing that we're definitely keeping an eye on.

But, you know, I think the narrative portion, there's a lot of components to this when we're talking about narrative. Talking about the D.C. lawsuit. Sorry, the New York lawsuit.

One of the narratives that initially came out of that, one of the legal arguments that was being made, that was very dangerous, but actually that legal argument was struck down in the initial lawsuit, even though overall the lawsuit did not prevail on the immigrant voting side.

One of the arguments was that allowing non-citizens to vote will actually somehow suppress the Black vote. That it would dilute the Black vote.

So, there was this idea that kind of this pitting against each other. And when you hear that, like, "Oh, vote dilution", that's not typically an argument that people of color would use. That's a white supremacist argument. That's a replacement theory argument, a 'they will not replace us' kind of argument.

And so that's exactly what's happened. You have people behind the scenes that are finding people of color to represent them, that will put forth this argument.

And that argument is not just being used in a legal realm, but it's also being used as localities are trying to push for these initiatives.

So, you see these debates happening at the city council level. It happened in Oakland. It happened in New York. When these measures are looking to get passed, there's concern around vote dilution of others, whether it's the Black community, or white citizen community.

So, I think that narrative piece is actually a very important component when we're thinking about campaigns for immigrant voting.

Let's see, what's next? Oh, yes, okay. As was mentioned earlier, the outlook on immigrant rights is very bleak at the federal level. It doesn't really matter what happens in November. It's been bleak, it will continue to be bleak.

And so that's why building local power is so important. I really appreciated Carlos's football map with the offensive strategy in the local, state and and the federal, because I think we're all agreed... I shouldn't say we're all agreed. I think certain folks in the immigrant rights movement agreed that nothing's going to happen at the federal level that's going to be any good for inclusive policy.

So, what we have left, is to look at the state and the local level, and these are where these policies are being pushed. How do we put the levers of power directly into the hands of the people who are being directly impacted?

So, this slide shows a little bit of San Francisco's version of immigrant voting. I'm not going to talk too much in detail about it. It's restrictive in some ways, and it's expansive in other ways.

But this initiative was on the ballot in 2016. The same election where folks were voting for Trump, who eventually became President.

So, as folks are hearing on the campaign trail, this campaign is rooted in hate, they're also hearing about what we call propend. This proactive, positive measure that could empower thousands more in the community.

And I think why this initiative was so important at the time, is because it gave people something to believe in. It wasn't about saying no. I think that's often a criticism of, I think, progressives in the left. It's like, "Well, you say no to everything, but you don't have nothing to put forward."

So, I think that this was an alternative. It wasn't about saying no to S-Com, or no to PEP, or no to enforcement, it was about saying, "Yes, power. We want power."
And so we often use the saying, "We're choosing power, not panic", leading up to this election for prop-

Annette:
... choosing power, not panic, leading up to this election for Prop N because it wasn't about playing into peoples fears. It was about tapping into people's power. And despite required unity, not just... definitely amongst the immigrant community members that we were organizing, but also citizen rights. Citizens are going to be the ones voting on this. Those are the folks that we have to win over to get this measure past at the time.

And I think that, in the face of Trump's campaign trail, everyone felt attacked in one way or another. So there was some kind of affinity towards feeling like you were part of the marginalized community. If you had not felt that before, you were feeling it now. And so, we were successful in 2016. The measure passed. It was implemented. We have school board elections every other year, so it was implemented in 2018. This November will be the sixth election where noncitizens have been able to vote. We've shown that it's possible and can be implemented. We would love to see it expanded. We're following and hoping to learn from Santa Anna, but it is something that can work and will actually give people power.

I think more, part of the title for this session was about resistance, and I think when we think about resistance, often we try to come up with like, "What's the most radical idea that has never ever, like, the sentences hasn't even been uttered yet. We need to find that needle in the haystack and we need to make that happen." And I think that political imagination is definitely important. I'm not trying to diminish the importance of... In fact, it is crucial for our survival. But sometimes, political imagination is coming back to something as vanilla as voting. Because I think, especially from an Immigrant Rights Movement perspective, when you have nothing, vanilla can taste amazing.

Also, just for broader context here, it's not just about immigrant voting. I think we're seeing efforts for enfranchisement across a lot of different areas. Vote16 efforts growing more and more popular across the country. Efforts to enfranchise folks who are on parole. Folks who are currently incarcerated for felony convictions. So there's a choir here and immigrant voting is just one part of it, but it's all the same family. So when I think about, like, "Well, what does it mean to belong?" And I think for voting rights, or immigrant rights advocates such as myself and others on this panel, I think it means not just having a voice but having a voice that matters.

Carlos:
Thank you so much, Annette. I really appreciate your shout-out, by the way, because what we're doing in Santa Anna I honestly think may be not possible without the support of you all. So thank you so much for that. So I want to turn it quick back to the audience just to bring some energy back into you all. And I'm going to split you up into three groups. So we want to know, what did these presentations bring up for you. Like, how did it make you feel? One word or two, starting with my folks here on the left. Feel free to just shout out any word.

Hopeful, cool. Revelatory. All right. How about folks here on the right? What did this bring up for you? Inspired. Agitating. Illuminating. Awesome. All right. And how about all of you in the back? Insightful. Empowered. Sweet. So, I only got up here in the front, agitated. Everyone else is feeling inspired? Angry. Okay, cool. Schooled? I like that. It's cool. All right. Thank you for checking in. I really appreciate it.

So, for the next section, we're going to be heading in to our panel, the speakers. We're going to honestly talk about all of this, everything that was presented, pretty much all day long. We have had multiple dinners over the past few nights where we went on about this for hours. One of the really cool things about this space is that it brings people together like that where we have conversations that we wouldn't have been able to have. All right, so first question's going to be to Carlos. Earlier, you mentioned the National Day Labor Organizing Network. They're a national organization, one of the first to organize day laborers. They're my mentors also and coaches. You have worked on this strategy and this training with them for a while. They introduced this analogy called the ICE Octopus many years ago and the ICE Octopus describes the multiple arms of immigration enforcement that are embedded into our communities.

If we cut off on tentacle on the ice monster, there are still many more that exist. So how can we, as a movement, use the ICE Octopus as a tool to understand where we can intervene to dismantle immigration enforcement and eliminate police ICE collaboration?

Lawrence Benito:
Thank you. This analysis of the ICE Octopus stemmed out of a lot of the fights that the National Day Labor Organizing Network was supporting at the local level from Arizona, from Phoenix Arizona to Santa Anna and Orange County and Georgia and other parts of the country where day laborers were being under attack. There was ordinances being implemented locally that restricted day laborers from asking for employment in public spaces. And then, from there, it turned into once police officers will criminalize day laborers and arrest them. That led to them being transferred to ICE.

And so, the idea of us looking at ICE as an ICE Octopus monster, because octopus are cute, but there's also we think of a ice monster, it's an ICE Octopus, was an important tool for us on the local level to combat immigration enforcement, combat against secure communities, 287 G, and PEP, and all those different iterations that ICE continues to reinvent how to spread its tentacles, and it is right. We were able to make California a actuary city and decrease deportation transfers numbers drastically.

But then, they got smart about driver's licenses, of license plate, using technology to read license plates for ICE to better see where folks that they're looking for are at. And they go even more creative now accessing purchasing data from companies from Amazon and other places to really track down immigrants. And the idea from ICE is, and this is what Kris Kobach made the case of, that there's not enough ICE officers or immigration officers in the United States to deport every single person. But there's then the key idea of the multiplier effect. How do you use multiple agencies, tools, technology, to be able to track down immigrants. And this is where us having that analysis comes into place because now we can see, "All right. The tentacle will pop of here. We can cut it right on time. The tentacle is popping over there, or..." and then as soon as this is happening, we probably are going to expect it here in California. Or that's happening in Oregon. We got to learn from that.

So this idea was mapping out how ICE is moving and how they're getting creative for us to anticipate what is going to come for us. And so that has been a very effective tool for us.

Carlos:
Thank you, Carlos. I love that this tool was introduced to us because I think there was a point where a lot of us were very hopefully and put our eggs in one basket where if we abolish ICE, then everything will be solved. Or if everyone got citizenship, everything would be solved. And that simply just wasn't true. So the next question... Please bare with me. It's going to be a long one, and I'm going to ask Kareem to answer first.

From Dred Scott v. Sanford in 1856 which put into law that Black people in the U.S. are not citizens, claiming that enslaved people are not part of the political body, to the Chinese Exclusion ACT of 1882 which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S., to the passage of IIRAIRA and AEDPA 1996 which expanded the list of crimes that would allow the U.S. to depart more people and establish detention as a primary form of immigration enforcement, to the deportation of three million migrants by the Obama administration of which a significant portion were from Mexico and Central America, to Trump era policy which increased the deportation of Southeast Asian refugees, and the vilification of asylum seekers from Central America and the Caribbean today, how do these policies reflect a larger strategy of racialized exclusion and racial capitalism within the U.S. immigration system? How should an analysis of these policies inform the strategies and priorities of the Immigrant Rights Movement? Kareem?

Kareem:
Strategy.

Carlos:
Just a simple question.

Kareem:
Simple question. Right. So the strategy for me is always fear-based, right? But it's not the fear for the people that's making the policy or passing the law. It's for the community in general. If I tell you that you should fear this group of people, it has the effect of taking your power. So now, you're policing another group of people. It's xenophobia at its finest. So through the law and policies, they're creating xenophobic ideologies saying that this group is not a citizen. They don't have the same rights. Similar to what Carlos was speaking on with 287 G and all these different programs, it's the federalism of racism.

When you take those strategies and you implement them in the community at large, you now have the effect and the narrative that these groups are less than me or myself or my identity. You kind of end up in this corporate function. How do I properly explain? Rephrase the question one more time. I just want to get back to that part, just that last part.

Carlos:
How should an analysis of these policies inform the strategies and priorities of the Immigrant Rights Movement?

Kareem:
Okay. Once we know what the agenda is, which is my favorite thing, knowing where it's going. As you know, and I say this in a very loose many, Trump is my favorite president because he says things and does things that aren't in violation of the constitution. He gives us the outs to approach it while the Obama administration or the Biden administration do it secretly through 300 page bills, the backdoor stuff. Trump is more out front and he tells you where we're going with this and what we're going to do regardless of what you think about it right now. So now you have an idea of how you're being vilified.

So the immigrant's rights movements need to, I don't want to say this in a selfish way, just start fighting fire with fire. We're very soft in our approach on how we do things. We don't use the law as much as we can. Few other ways that we can do it, but empowering people to use the law. Doing the same things that they do. Be the sheriff in Texas that doesn't agree with the policy that you don't agree with. Filing the lawsuits, doing those things. And for lawyers, it's a boilerplate. It's not really a lot of originality in motion, like most of these motions, you can go on PACER and find them and see what they're argues are and substitute your own agenda and file it as a concerned citizen.

Carlos:
Thanks, Kareem. Anything you might want to add to this question? Do you want me to repeat it again? Yes?

Kareem:
Yeah.

Carlos:
Okay. Sure, yes. So, all of these policies I listed before, all of these exclusionary policies against very different migrant communities, how do these policies reflect a larger strategy of racial exclusion and racial capitalism within the U.S. immigration system? How should an analysis of these policies inform the strategies and priorities of the Immigrant Rights Movement? There's a lot of us that believe that the Immigrant Rights Movement has lacked a class analysis to it. Carlos, you want to share?

Lawrence Benito:
Yeah. I think that it's a lack of a class analysis and what's really more recent has been a lack of understanding of U.S. foreign policy interventions in the Global South. I think that people think about... for a long time, especially when there's a big push for immigration reform and all these tactics that were really coming from Washington D.C. were not coming from the local bottom-up, was focusing these polices, ignore what's happening outer. And migration is not a pull and push effect. Migration is about an empire that is reaching tentacles, talking about tentacles again. But it's reaching tentacles across the Global South and making people come here.

We're not here because we want to be here. We're here because we were forced to come here. Our communities were displaced. Our communities were displaced from one way or another, economically, war, all the things that we can say. But I think that it comes down to something more clear than ever, and it has been the Palestinian struggle in that it was very clear that the Biden administration did not hesitate to trade billions of dollars for waging a genocide overseas. Give that to the Republicans. Offer that in exchange of militarizing the border with some of the harshest immigrant policies at the border we have seen in decades. They were willing to link those two, and if anything, that should be a call from us to take that fight and foreign policy at the local level, which I think the Palestinian struggle as done very well in teaching us how it's done.

And I think for the Immigrant Rights Movement is to be clear that we cannot continue to be divided and that we're going to link arms with international struggles. This is not just a domestication policy and that's where the class analysis comes because it's about waging class working, like countries that have been exploited for a long time.

Carlos:
Thank you, Carlos. Agree completely. There was a speaker in the beginning that mentioned joint struggle and that's what we all need to learn and be a part of. So going back domestically, does anyone here know that when the immigration office of the United States, it's not called that actually, but essentially was actually established within the Department of Treasury? So it was seen as an economic thing, but then, over time, it moved to the Department of Homeland Security and became an issue of national security. And so, we know that it began as an economic issue, as an economic topic, so why is that we do not more closely and more explicitly connect our work as a movement to those ideas?

Kareem:
I'm going to say a lot of people don't know that. A lot of people don't know that immigration judges and immigration in its essence was a part of the Department of Treasury and some people wanted to go back that way, or some people want immigration judge to be Article III judges and have, what do you call it? Not be an employee of the Attorney General. So those strategies about the economics of it, what Carlos spoke to, about countries being destroyed, having to come here, that's a part of how we sell the American dream. This is how we speak to it. This is how we say, "Well, you know, we destroyed this country. Send me your best and your brightest." Because that's how labor works. We need people for labor. We need more bodies so we take your natural resources. We put corrupt government officials in place in certain countries. We do those things, but we don't acknowledge those things when we find so-called migrant crisises.

So the Immigrant Rights Movement are afraid of being what you call capitalists. They're afraid of having ambition to develop communities that they represent because they don't want to look like the opposition while they do things that the opposition is doing by saying, "Well, my organization is only for Latinos. My organization is only for Blacks, or my..." But you're doing other things that are more damaging. Going back to looking at what immigration is and how it serves the economy and why it serves the economy because the ideas that, as citizens, as Americans, we are in business. And business owners need employees.

Carlos:
Thanks, Kareem. Any last thought you all want to add to this?
It's actually funny. I think many people may experience this. At a foundation board meeting talking to the White foundation board members of this local foundation, and there was this woman, she was a White woman, she's a CEO, she was like, "I don't get why they are not more open about migration policy because who else is going to take these jobs?" She said it out loud and she said it directly. Anyways, that's what you talking about reminds me of. So, I'm going to switch gears a little bit. This question is actually for you, Kareem.

Kareem:
A lot of questions for me.

Carlos:
A lot of questions, yes. They're not pop quizzes. I'm sorry. The vilification and criminalization of immigrants has been facilitated by the entanglement of the criminal and immigration legal systems and the local and national policies, as well as media strategies geared to further demonize the community. You and Lawrence talked about this a lot actually. We've talked a lot about how there's an ongoing media strategy of identifying a quote, unquote, enemy. How can we use narrative and communication strategies to combat these narratives and instead promote belonging and solidarity?

Kareem:
Find the people that are promoting these arguments. Have open conversation with them because they don't know anything. They're just taking Tucker Carlson narratives and redistributing them but he comes from a criminal background. If you look at Tucker Carlson's history, his family is literally bootleggers that were migrant as well. When you take those narratives and you say where basically what we want to do is limit communities from progress. When you vilify these communities, you're saying that, "I don't want to give them the same opportunities, but I also don't want to give you the opportunity." Who is using the opportunity of the migrant crisis? How is employee? If you look at real estate development, who's doing the jobs? Asylum seekers. Who died on the bridge in Baltimore? These are the things that we have to look at.

So, while you're employing them, in the same note, you're saying that they're bad for the economy, or they're bad for the community. Unless we're willing to open up our minds and say, "Well, why are they using this strategy and why are we not adopting the strategy?" And ensuring that asylum seekers and migrants aren't exploded, aren't used for cheap labor, and build within marginalized communities to redistribute the wealth. That's the strategies, the fear mongering is to stop you from being able to think in this way. The social media influences that are pushing certain narratives from the popular news media, I would engage them because they have an audience. But the audience, often times, when they hear a other narrative that makes sense, when we start talking about what happens in South America and what's really happening, the history of this country going into places like Vietnam, like the whole Iran Contra scandal. Let's take those things and look at how they work and why they work and how we ignore that consistently as Americans and not view it in a way which is understanding, compassionate, instead of agreeing that these folks are just naturally bad.

Nobody is saving ten thousand or more U.S. dollars to walk through a jungle for no reason. They're not buying into that American dream that bad. We've created the conditions for it to happen. So we have to teach people these histories. Just similar to Palestine. Before October, a lot of folks didn't know the history of Palestine. But why? So we have to look at the why and the how and just ask the basic questions, who, what, why, where, and how. Dig deep and get to it.

Carlos:
Thanks, Kareem. I want to do a quick time check. Unfortunately, we only have about 15 minutes left and we have a lot of questions. And I do want to be able to field some questions from the audience as well, but I am going to ask one question before we move on to, hopefully, the last couple. We talked a lot about solidarity. Everyone here at this table knows that solidarity is not like a destination. It's an ongoing process. It's not about seeing our experiences as the same or seeing our struggles as the same and so therefore we should be hand-in-hand. What, in your opinion, then, are the key principles or strategies for building solidarity between migrant communities? And start with Annette and then Lawrence.

Annette:
Oh, tough one. I think, as I reflect on how we have done solidarity building through some of our local work, I think for us, the key components are really trying to find that common ground where we can be united across the board, and not making concessions that would exclude people. We're all in the same boat, so I think we actually have an active local campaign to address our language access in San Francisco. We were working in a coalition...

Annette:
... language access in San Francisco, and so we're working in a coalition that includes Asian/Pacific Islander, Latinx, African, Afro-Caribbean, and Arab communities. They're all impacted in San Francisco because, for many groups, there just is not language access. In San Francisco there is language access for Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino, but there's nothing for Arabic, nothing for Vietnamese, nothing for Korean.

In a lot of these conversations, there are these points where decisions need to be made, where they're saying, "Okay. We can provide language access if the population of that particular language reaches a certain threshold," and then that's the cutoff. You'll get to include Vietnamese and Russian, but Arabic is out. Tigrinya is out. In those moments, how do we approach those as a coalition?

I think, when it comes to solidarity building, it means that we do not give in to those false lines in the sand that try to divide us. That's just one example of how we've been doing locally.

Speaker 3:
Thanks, Annette.

Lawrence:
I think probably two things that I'd want to say on this. First, and I think it's, on one hand, easy to say, centering directly impacted people in the strategy and decision making for campaigns. But that doesn't just mean creating a seat at the table, because we see the tokenism. "Okay. We'll have Black immigrant, Latinx come in," and then ... It's more than that.

Because, for some of our Black immigrant organizations, they're one, two-person shops. It's not enough just to provide a seat at the table. When they're at our meetings, they're not doing the work back at their organizations. I've found there's more that we need to do to be able to create a movement that's inclusive and really helps organizations build and do the work that they need to in the community. That's one thing I want to say.

Then the other thing, I think, and we're just seeing this with some of the politics and loss of ground that we've had now ... Before, we would get something good, but coupled with bitter pills that we would have to swallow. The shit sandwich.

But now, we're not even getting the good stuff. They're trading our stuff for other things to happen, to fund wars, to fund genocide. It's not enough for us to go back to our same communities and organize, and, "How do we get 50% plus one?" We can go from campaign to campaign and not actually build the power that we need.

We need to go beyond the comfort zone of talking to the people that are already with us. We've got to figure out, how do we build with other folks even if they may not believe in everything that we do? I think that is something that's been weighing on my mind more and more. We've got to figure out how we build the bigger we, but we also have to talk to people that disagree with us.

Speaker 3:
Definitely. Thanks, Lawrence. The next question's going to be for Carlos, starting out. This question, I think, is going to have an interesting answer, maybe interesting reaction from the audience.

During our previous sessions here, preparing for the panel, we discussed how the immigrant rights movement has not really been united or excited around a proactive policy agenda, and we haven't really seen this since 2017 with the Dream Act, or maybe just, actually, DACA back in 2012. For more than a decade, both Democrats and Republicans have forced our movement toward comprehensive immigration reform, or CIR, as the solution.

Why do many advocates actually consider CIR a failed strategy? What alternative strategies or demands could unite immigrant rights advocates in pursuit of meaningful change instead?

Carlos:
Thank you. I really appreciate what Lawrence said regarding that we're just getting the bad stuff. I think something that is important is begin on having someone at the table, is ensuring that they actually have the power to decide.

What happened with comprehensive immigration reform and all the iterations that have come after that since 2006, 2010, 2012, '16, and now, '20, with a very history, the whole notion has been that the immigrant rights folks nationally have put all their eggs in one basket, which is pushing Congress to do something when the political coalition is not there. Then relying on the party that has not hesitated to put us on the back burner, because that's what they did in 2010. When they had the votes, they didn't give us anything. Then, more recently, they control the White House, Congress, and the Senate, and they give us a lot of excuses about why it couldn't happen.

For us, that has been a failed strategy, putting our eggs in one basket and putting us on the defensive, then having us all scramble at the local level. "How are we going to organize around this Dream bill at a national level," that folks there very well know is not going to pass, but has been very good fundraising machine.

I think that that's what I think about, us moving beyond defensive to offensive, and us stop getting the bad pills. We're not going to swallow them. We know what the trade-off is looking like right now. We do not have what Kris Kobach and Tanton drafted. They drafted not just a strategy, it was a whole game plan.

We are pushing bill after bill that is isolationist from one and another. We've no cohesive plan. That conversation cannot happen from the top to the bottom. We're going to have to go back to the basics. It's going to have to be having tough conversations local to local, state to state about what is our agenda.

We don't know. We don't know what that answer is going to look like, but we're testing. We're testing non-citizen voting. We're testing and trying, and we're hoping that something will emerge out of that.

Speaker 3:
The answer to that is we need to figure it out. We need to go back to our local communities, build from our bases, and we need to figure it out together with them.
My last question before I turn over to Q&A is ... You all are on the ground. You talk to community members every day. You do the work. You walk the talk. What brings you hope about the future of the immigrant rights movement? What do you think is next?

Karim:
I think we're identifying what the problems are, and we're coming up with the solutions. What do I think is next? I look at things like DACA and how DACA was passed, how it went to the Supreme Court, what the Supreme Court said, that, technically speaking, DACA is not a law. It was something that Obama ... A policy that he put out there.

But, because society has changed and recognized this group of migrants as essential, so to speak, they passed the law. Where their circuit splits, how we approach the courts, what arguments we bring, what's constitutional, and how we venue shop, going to places like New York, California to create legal instances where we can create a circuit split where the Supreme Court has to answer the issue and decide on what the right is.

Some of the things is how we base build, commonalities. If your community was waged war on, this community is waged war on, we have common issues. If we're being criminalized as Blacks or migrants, we have common issues. When we start to see what common issues we have, it's easier for us to unite.

If we explain that ... A lot of my conversations is explaining what we have in common, and how we're being viewed and why we're being viewed that way, so people can develop a proper understanding.

Lawrence:
I think there's a growing awareness that the immigrant rights movement, while still very powerful ... We cannot continue to fight our fights in a silo or on our own. We need to build a multiracial, multi-issue movement that connects local and state with federal power. We've got to build from the ground up to win on the issues that we care about, on a range of issues across very different communities.

Carlos:
I think about, at the local level, in Santana, and San Francisco, and other parts, we are taking back the conversation about, "What does citizenship mean in our communities?" and redefining that. If the federal level says that immigrants cannot do X, Y, Z, at a local level we say, "We will do X, Y, and Z," and then we'll test it and then see what happens. That, for us, is creating that as a belonging framework in our local communities.

I'll end it with this. I think sometimes we can theorize and we can try to make sense of things for the immigrant rights movement, and we get too deep into the policy. But, sometimes, how do we break community threat? How do we do this work locally?

I saw this video and this interview happening in Mexico, because, in Mexico, they are also having the tough conversations with migration. They interview a Mexican street food vendor in Mexico City, and they ask him, "What do you think about Central Americans," specifically Hondurans, "that are taking away your jobs?" He goes, "It's competition."

This Mexican responded with the most simple answer, "[Spanish 01:22:32]," the sun rises for everyone. That's how we have to approach it.

Annette:
Thank you, Carlos. I think, when thinking about moving forward, I think the ... We're just talking about CIR, talking about different things. I think part of the issue, and, I think, really what we're hitting home here, is that we need to be the ones that own the agenda, moving forward. We need to be the ones that are putting forward proactive measures that are going to be the most expansive, the most inclusive that we can imagine.

I think one of the things that ... And I just appreciate, because I think I was just reminded of this because Karim and Carlos also mentioned DACA, I think that was one of the things that was very inspiring about the push for DACA in 2012. Was that the undocumented youth that led that did not wait for the people who have a seat at the table in Washington to fight for them. They didn't wait for labor to say, "Okay. We'll include this in our," whatever we're trying to push at the federal level. They took power into their own hands and they went and fought for it, and they got it even through the courts. Undocumented youth were the face of this every step of the way.

I think that that ... I'm sure there are a lot of criticisms of everything in the last few years, but at the core of it, that type of unity, that type of unwillingness to concede on different things, I feel like, is something that has been missing for many, many years in the movement, and something that continues to inspire and push at least me forward in terms of thinking about how we organize for the future.

Speaker 3:
Thanks, Annette. All of those offensive strategies ... That's exactly what you all are doing in expanding immigrant voting locally.

All right. We're going to end this with some questions, and I want to break it up again into different sides of the room. I'm going to ask everyone to share your question. If you're still going to stick around with us, just ask, and talk to the panelists.

On this side, does anyone have a question? The first question asked, "As those who are working in nonprofits, leading nonprofits, how can these nonprofits share power, finances, et cetera with the larger immigrant rights movement? What are some best practices, things that we can do?"

The second speaker shared a little bit of background, more of a comment. Really cool to hear that you're interested in introducing an ordinance to pass immigrant voting.

Then the last speaker talked about how, "What is our strategy to target these corporations that are benefiting off the exploitation of migrants across the world?"

If anyone would like to take ... Let's start with Lawrence.

Lawrence:
I'll just start ... we weren't prepared when the buses started coming in August. We had to quickly scramble to figure that out. The reality is there's never enough money to meet the need when we were getting 500 people a day. We're going to soon figure that out again as we head towards the DNC in August.

Some of the things that we've learned ... Everyone has a role to play. When we had over 3500 people encamped outside the police stations, it was really nice to see humanity, of mutual aid associations, just come out. Informal groups that, whether it was churches or neighborhoods, create a strategy of, "We're going to take over these police stations to help provide food, clothing, shelter for people." That was appreciated and needed.

Then there were organizations like us that would organize and advocate that the city do their share, the state do their share, and also fight at the federal level that, "We really need federal dollars here to meet the mission." It hasn't been perfect, and, inside of all this, we've had to pressure the mayor and the governor that they need to do more, inside of the tensions that were happening and people saying, "What about our communities?"

It's a long way of answering ... There's a role for everyone to play, private philanthropy, government, organizations for us. Not everyone's equipped to do the direct service, but there is a role that each organization can play, whether on the organizing side, the direct service side, even people that are just doing mutual aid in their neighborhoods.

Carlos:
I think ... I appreciate so much that, and going to leave on you now, how difficult it is to ... It's beautiful to see the solidarity and the work that you're doing, but also the understanding of the difficult ... We'll see the different waves of folks that will be coming. As more time passes, I think organizations are going to get their footing, a little bit, in terms of what you all are doing.

I want to go back to the framework of empowerment, because I think that the opportunity there, once service organizations find their footing, is now you have access, and contact, and relationship to all these folks. The political education, the opportunity for cultural bridging is there. Being able to now ...

The mistakes that a lot of us made in the past was we mobilized folks, and then we don't engage them. But the tough conversations come after, when they start to other others. I think that that's an opportunity service organizations have, of using an empowerment framework to bring folks together and politicize folks so that it makes it easier in the next fights.

I think that that's something that could be an idea. I definitely would love to talk to you, and I'm excited to hear about Washington DC.

To the questions back there, I really appreciate the question. I go back again to my ICE octopus, because part of that mass incarceration or the incentive for mass detention was all the money that private corporations got from jailing folks, for incarcerating folks.

That wasn't, again, by chance. It was by design. You had ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, that sat down with Kris Kobach, all these policymakers, private corporations, and drafted Arizona SB1070. We learned from that.

I think the challenge right now, and I think something that is emerging because, again, of Palestine, is that there's a intense pressure on corporations and the role that they play on genocide, on weapons manufacture. I think, for us, as immigrant movements, as we look into tech, specifically that are collaborating a lot of ICE, is, how do we then turn the pressure on those corporations for their being complicit for, what did you call, human trafficking?

But I think that's part of the larger framework around ... First, I think, there's fights, and I think there's folks moving on there. I heard there is another national organization that is looking into tech and immigration. But I think the challenge here for us is, how do we make sure that those fights are not isolated from one and another?
I really appreciate that comment. I think that there has been a lot of good work done in targeting private corporations for profiting from immigrant detention, but of course there's more to be done.

Karim:
What you're doing in Washington ... Don't just give, guide. A lot of that happens in these spaces where we just give, and we provide this resource, but we don't guide people through the path of criminalization and what they might go through when they're in the community, and the police, and what could happen.

Give that, but also guide them into work authorization, filling out their asylum application. Some places they do asylum applications, they spend 10 hours on it. For me, it takes 15 minutes because I actually give you the application in your language. You won't need the evidence until you have a hearing, and it could be amended. That quickens the pace, and that's just a strategic move.

In terms of how we deal with corporations, human trafficking, kidnapping ... In violation of the Fourth Amendment, immigrant arrests don't have warrants. People in detention are being held in violation.

U visas. Calling the corporate giants as the culprits, saying that they're the ones that committed the crimes, so you're eligible for a U visa. I don't think they want to give folks citizenship or status through those means, so when we start approaching it like that and saying these corporate giants are in fact committing crimes changes the narrative.

Speaker 3:
That's great.

Annette:
I think, just around this point around power-sharing, it really actually made me think about our ... We have a California local voting coalition now. CAAA had a little bit of funding to actually put together a statewide immigrant voting convening, and so got a chance to meet a bunch of really great folks.
As a result, we had about seven or eight folks that were like, "We want to continue meeting." There's no funding for this, it's just folks that just want to work on this in a ongoing capacity at the state level. We started to have biweekly meetings or twice-a-month meetings.

In those spaces, the way that we share power is that everybody has an equal voice, and every decision point is approached in a democratic way. There are no assumptions made. I think that it has actually developed into something like a very beautiful coalition, and we actually were able to secure our first funding back in January, so February. Feel like it was just a very nice example of how folks come together, share power. Folks that had not worked together formally in the past, and were able to approach one another with respect and really acknowledge the different power that everyone brings to the table.

Speaker 1:
That concludes this episode of our special series of Who Belongs, a podcast from the Othering and Belonging Institute. For more episodes from this series featuring discussions from our Othering and Belonging Conference in April, visit our website at belonging.berkeley.edu/whobelongs. Thank you for listening.