"Legalization Kills Revolution: The case against citizenship"
by Raúl Al-qaraz Ochoa
Un Pueblo Sin Fronteras
(December 27, 2010)

The legalization of over 12 million people will not take place, not in this country, not today, not tomorrow, not even the decade after that. Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) has failed time and time again-CIR doesn't get passed even when enforcement and border militarization are emphasized for republican support. More recently, not even with its narrow scope can we get the DREAM Act passed. It needed 5 votes in the senate to live and 5 democrats voted against it. Any form of legalization has become a political liability-both to republicans and democrats alike. No one can deny that the state of brown "amerika" is horrifying. The right-wing (liberals and democrats among them) have hijacked the immigration debate to a place where criminalization and white supremacy are not only tolerated, but also applauded and rewarded.



Currently in Arizona we have the new Mississippi where almost every major political position has been won through the vote by a white supremacist mafia ring-from president of the az senate russell pearce (connected to neo-nazi groups) to governor jan brewer (puppeteer to private prisons contractor interests: c.c.a.). At the national level, things are not much different, even though democrats are the majority of the senate, they are unwilling to support the brown communities that voted them into power and made their majority, at least in the senate, possible.



Neither through decades of letter-writing campaigns, lobbying congresspeople, phone-banking, vigils, the ballot box, marches, protests, civil disobedience, closed door conversations between High-spanic organizations and the government, or democrat-sponsored backdoor compromises have we gained anything remotely close to legalization! Again, no matter what nice words Cecilia Muñoz (National Council of La Raza VP turned Obama staffer) may use to describe our "progress" within the Obama administration, the state of brown amerika is as devastating as it has never been... and it's about to get worse. Politically, the prospect for legalization grows dimmer and dimmer.



Whether attending pro-migrant marches, organizing community meetings or having family conversations at the dinner table, the consensus is clear, we all want "legalization". Not even the most revolutionary of thinkers or do-ers can escape the fact that our community not only wants legalization, but also desperately needs it. We have mothers without access to health care, fathers incarcerated for months, broken families, thousands of youth without access to higher education, grandmothers that refuse to call the police because they fear someone will get deported, brown community members as growing targets of hate crimes and police brutality and undocumented womyn, queer and transgender people more prone to sexual violence. All these problems rooted (partly, not entirely) in living a life without papers.



So it is obvious that legalization would be the solution to our problems. Right?



OR...



is legalization just a simplistic, easy, knee-jerk response to a deeper oppression?



Undeniably, legalization can serve as:



1. a concrete victory that positively impacts real lives and



2. represents a small and necessary step towards a larger vision of liberation from oppression and domination.



With this said, here are critical points (rarely spoken of) that should be included in our conversations around "citizenship" and "legalization":



Legalization as a term is problematic. The definition of legalization is "the process of removing a legal prohibition against something that is currently illegal. " The word itself dehumanizes communities because it acknowledges and legitimizes an apartheid system that segregates people based on a "legal" or "illegal" status. We lose from the very beginning by using this term because we criminalize ourselves and acknowledge that we are "criminal" "unlawful" "unauthorized" "illegal" "aliens" that need to be "legalized" and given permission to be here by the state. Legalization as a term and as a demand feeds into the framework that criminalizes our families.



Citizenship comes from a history of bloodshed. From the very foundation of the united states of america, Native and African people were completely excluded from freedom and citizenship. In order to justify land robbing of indigenous land and the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of African people, the U.S. capitalist/imperialist machine had to deny their humanity and by extension deny them papers. Legally, they would not be considered human beings. Citizenship and borders were thus created as tools of capitalist/imperialist oppression meant to dominate and control the land, resources and labor and who had access to them. After Europeans founded the united (colonial) states, and after they defined/imposed borders and citizenship, Africans and northern Natives became the first colonized/undocumented groups. This was the beginning of a history of bloodshed, where the concept of citizenship facilitated the process of slavery and genocide.



Citizenship is meant to always exclude a group. Throughout history, we have seen that immigration policy is created in a way to define who is included and who is excluded from citizenship. Different policies at different points in history have excluded certain communities from citizenship based on race, national origin, class, gender and sexual orientation. Today, citizenship is tied to civil rights. But not everyone fits under the civil rights framework because civil rights only applies to citizens of a nation state. So we should be careful in how we talk about citizenship and inclusion, because within this framework there will always be some people who do not have access to citizenship and civil rights.



Citizenship is perfect for capitalist exploitation. Mexican and Central American labor has become the most appealing to the ruling class; Largely because they could easily divide and conquer the labor force (similar to how they did during slavery times) between "American" and "immigrant", between "citizen" and "illegal" or essentially between "human" and "sub-human". This has not only crafted a perfectly segregated labor force, but also a social, psychological, cultural, economic and political apartheid system segregated along racial, class, gender, sexual orientation and citizenship lines. The concept of citizenship has helped capitalism by always providing a subclass of exploitable, disposable cheap labor at their convenience. Citizenship legitimizes the global capitalist order, as well as their borders and their nation states. So when we talk about citizenship today, we should ask who/what benefits from the exploitation of an "illegal class".



In short, as long as citizenship exists in society, there will always be oppression.



To answer the question whether legalization is the solution to our problems, the answer is NO. Legalization is a(n important) band-aid, but not a solution to systemic social, political and economic problems. If we were all legalized tomorrow, we would still have the systems that cause racism, poverty, sexism, homophobia and wars. As a person with papers, I support communities that identify legalization as their demand. But we must build our analysis and fight for something larger than legalization because otherwise, legalization will just be the crumb that kills our hunger for meaningful, systemic change. As much as it will help us in the here and now, legalization can stall revolutionary change and can lead to a liberation deferred. Let's stop dreaming within the limits of the system and "passable" legislation. Let's imagine a world free from oppression and beyond borders; a world without nation states, without citizenship, without papers. The citizenship status apartheid system needs to be abolished for there to be liberation for migrants and all people everywhere. We should never have to live in a world where a community has to fight for legalization and equal rights.



No one in this world should be undocumented.



Citizenship and legalization not only kill revolution, they effectively kill opportunities for justice and equality for all.



"LEGALIZATION NOW" must turn into "LEGALIZATION TO END CITIZENSHIP AND BORDERS!"


http://network.nshp.org/forum/topics/le ... revolution