Immigration is a Human Rights Issue
“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”
“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”
Carlos E. Rojas Rodriguez was arrested last month during a sit in at a local legislative office in central New Jersey, a protest organized to press state lawmakers to grant driving privileges to undocumented immigrants.
Rojas Rodriguez spent several hours in jail, before being released — a sacrifice he says he would make again, because the challenges faced by the undocumented cut to the core of what it means to be human, and because he is in a position that many are not to put his body on the line.
“I’m a US citizen, but I was undocumented in this country for 10 years, and I was privileged enough to qualify under a family petition to adjust my status,” he told me recently (I interviewed him for a story on the driver’s license fight that ran in NJ Spotlight). “But the immigration issue has marked my life.”
I first came across Rojas Rodriguez’ arrest on Facebook, where he posted a photo of himself being escorted off in handcuffs. On the photo, he superimposed the legend “LICENSIAS SI!, PROMESAS NO!”
In his post, he explained that the undocumented drive because they have to “so they can go to work and provide for their families or to take their children to school or medical appointments.” They do this despite the risk of a traffic stop that could lead to arrest, federal detention and deportation, and family separation.
“Interactions with law enforcement are the top reason why undocumented immigrants end up in deportation proceedings,” he said. This, he said, is why he was willing to be arrested.
“I am tired of getting phone calls from families who are being deported,” he said. “I am tired of community members being terrified about having to go to court to pay a traffic ticket because they are afraid that ICE is waiting for them. And I am tired that everyday, (New Jersey) benefits from my community’s labor but the state does not give them a (license) so they can make it to their workplaces safely.”
Rojas Rodriguez works with Movimiento Cosecha, a national human rights group that is seeking to make the nation’s Byzantine immigration system more humane and the nation more welcoming by reminding Americans that immigrants “are the labor this country takes for granted.”
There are about 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States, the lowest number in about a decade, according to the Pew Research Center. About 7.8 million are working — making up. about 4.8 percent of the workforce, mostly in lower wage jobs, according to Pew, “such as farming (where they were about a quarter of the workforce in 2016) and construction (15%) than in higher-skilled categories.”
Nearly all of the immigrant workers I’ve interviewed in recent years are employed in these kinds of jobs — working in warehouses at below market wages, often being forced to pay their employers for transportation to work; cleaning houses and offices or taking care of children in homes or at daycare sites, or washing dishes or sweating over hot grills in small restaurants.
They work six days a week. They work multiple jobs. They take care of their families, shop for food, visit the doctor. They struggle — more than most of us, they struggle, and they do so even as they are forced to continuously look over their shoulder, even as they are often taken advantage of by unscrupulous employers.
Wage theft, for instance, is fairly common among businesses that employ undocumented immigrants — with employers withholding wages, paying less than the state minimum or failing to pay overtime.
These workers and families often are not in position to fight publicly for themselves, due to the threat of deportation, and they are forced to rely on others to advocate for them.
“We have the privilege that we know that if we get arrested, you know, for sort of minor violation, that we ‘re going to be in jail for a few hours, more often than not, and we can be released and we’re not going to be facing deportation,” he told me. “But there’s half a million individuals in (New Jersey) whose lives will be will be marred if they had a negative interaction with law enforcement or just a regular traffic stop.”
Johanna Calle, director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said the focus on driver’s licenses offers New Jersey advocates a real-world way to help immigrants at a time when the federal government under Donald Trump is growing more hostile.
“The federal government is not addressing the issue of immigration,” she told me. “Comprehensive immigration reform has been on on the on the radar for a very long time, and it still hasn’t happened. So it really does leave it up to the states.”
Thirteen states already grant driving privileges. Some, such as New Jersey, offer in-state tuition rates and access to school aid to the undocumented, while states and municipalities limit cooperation between law enforcement and the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
“New Jersey can’t fix the immigration system,” Calle said. “But at the very least, (licenses are) something that can really do to make the live the change the lives of so many people that are being impacted by the broken immigration system.”
Each of these individual concerns are just part of a larger constellation of issues that make up the immigration debate, which is at heart about the meaning of borders and whether we will be welcoming to people who are seeking a better life, or willing to turn them away. The question of legality, which so many disingenuously raise, is just not relevant in an age when everything else — money, information, jobs — flows easily across borders, and when our own foreign, economic and environmental policies destabilize the countries from which these 21st-century refugees are fleeing.
Many immigration hardliners claim that they just want the latest group to wait their turn, but this a canard. Even as they make this claim, these same anti-immigration groups also call for lower numbers to be admitted and for a return to a system that essentially favors middle-class and professional migrants, or “preserves our culture.” The racial subtext of this should be clear.
Our immigration history is checkered. We have asserted ourselves as both a nation of immigrants, the Statue of Liberty standing as “Mother of Exiles” in Emma Lazarus’ words, and as desirous of building a wall to shut out the world. We ask the world to send us its tired and poor, its “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and then allow ourselves to fall prey to xenophobic delusions that lead to violence and know-nothing-ism.
Right now, the know-nothings are winning. They hold federal power and they can ramp up enforcement — arrests already were up 353 percent in 2017, according to NorthJersey.com — even as states like New Jersey fight back.