2/22/21

By Josh Rubin

Many in this group would like to believe that, now that Trump is out of power, the struggle for migrant rights is over. The thing that got me involved, grabbed my attention, was family separation. I rushed down to the border, thinking i would add a voice to the cries for the policy to end.

But what I found was something different. The longer I have spent looking at the plight of people who migrate, the more I see that the issue is not one that restricts itself to one political party or leader. The border that I traveled to is just the starting point for understanding the generations of struggle, the deep history and ingrained injustice in all of our assumptions about the issue.

It may relieve some pain in those of us who have taken on the struggle to hear the more sympathetic language from the party now in power, after years of overt racism and xenophobia. But it will take more than kinder language to elevate issues of human rights over what has for years now, years well beyond these last four, been a campaign about security issues that simply are not true. And are certainly not sympathetic.

There are also people in this group who are aware of the danger of thinking that a simple change in administration is all that is needed to right the wrongs that they, and I, have seen firsthand. We are witnesses, and our witnessing has shown us that it goes deeper than that, will take more than that. The injustice began long before it grabbed our attention, and we will be doomed to suffer it long after if we do as some argue here that we should do.

We are told that the massive deportations going on right now, called expulsions, of black and brown peoples, are not happening. It can’t be true. The numbers are unreliable. We are asked for patience, that the people desperate enough to risk their lives to save their lives need to wait while the folks with the nicer language figure out how to navigate their own political waters, so as not to enrage the right wing by letting “infected and contagious” foreigners into our country, a country that has the highest infection rate in the world.

But some of us know better. We know what we have seen. We know what we see today. We know that we have eyes and ears and voices.