Thursday, September 07, 2017

About DACA, immigration, politics, and racial panics

Let’s interrupt this pilgrimage to share some resources for under-informed but well-meaning friends who sense that Trump has committed a moral atrocity by ending DACA. If we do not live in physical proximity to the daily struggles of our immigrant neighbors, authorized and unauthorized, immigration “policies” can seem remote and impenetrable. They can even seem incomprehensible if we do have vulnerable friends!
In 1994 life threw me into an organizing role in California’s version of Trump’s DACA atrocity, Prop. 187 which denied unauthorized immigrant children access to education and publicly funded healthcare. It wasn’t hard to help people put their outrage in motion; folks were ready to go! But concurrently I remember running around asking everyone with more experience: “Explain ‘immigration’ please.” By and large they couldn’t offer any complex sense of how we got to this awful point and how this “system” worked. 
Today there are many resources to help those of us who don’t know the ins and outs of US immigration policies and our history of race panics. Here is a short list of different sorts:


Podcast on the politics of how DACA became policy.  Unsparing of both Dems and GOPers. 



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