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BORDER JUSTICE
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Brief on “MIGRANTS, JUSTICE & THE BORDER”
The event I attended was “Metropolitan Borderlands: Migrant justice in Phoenix”. The panel discussion was held on Wednesday April 7th. Many of the speakers concentrated their discussion on how immigrants are still mistreated, how their rights are being taken, and nobody is providing help. A representative from the Phoenix Police Department gave a few statistics on how many billions of dollars were spent to train and equip the police force to the new demand: many of them had to learn Spanish, new laws, more units... The cop stated that their job is to treat equally every person, no matter if they are citizens or immigrants, legal or illegal. But speaker Suzanna Maclay gave a few examples that proved the cop’s statement wrong. She talked about the group she is in, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, and the project they have in mind, which is to ensure safety to refugees and immigrants. She knew many cases of people being treated unfairly or unequally. This reminded me of the speech that the chief from the Border Patrol gave us on our trip to Nogales, were he said that they even help people that get caught crossing the borders by providing them first aids treatments, or give them water. The speaker that caught many attentions was the last one, Jose Cortez the representative from Chicanos por la Causa. He is a “border crosser” himself; and truly talked about how hard of a journey it is to cross the border, and how hard it is to live with it. Chicanos por la Causa can be visited at www.cplc.org/ Salvador Reza, director of the Macheualli Work Center, talked a lot about how our society needs to stop mistreating immigrants, specifically the day laborers. Mr. Reza talked a lot about the day laborers in Phoenix, and I related part of his speech to the book we had to read and make discussion points out of it, called: “Disposable Domestic: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy” by Grace Chang. The author in her book talked about a very interesting point: how “the people that do our least desirable jobs are the most crucial to our society”. And usually we leave those jobs (nurses, nannies, janitors, low wages) to immigrants. Something that really caught my attention occurred at the end, when a person got up to make a statement and brought up many facts related to how immigrants bring to our country many pregnancy cases of young women, more drugs, more car and house thefts. The rep. from the police department said that from their stats migrants do bring an increase in crime in our city, but they’re still a minor percentage of all the crimes committed, and he also said that: “their crimes are not so different from crimes that Americans do”. But this incident shows how even after a long conversation of how unfairly people can be treated, our society keeps going against them to take no blame.
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