America's biggest unfinished business in 2013: Immigration Reform
When witnessing others' pain makes us feel uneasy or uncomfortable, it is easy to turn the other way. When those people are different, turning away is even easier. The things I have seen and heard in my work this year are what most people deem inappropriate for dinner conversation: decomposed bodies, orphaned children, soldiers with licenses to kill, military checkpoints, snipers, black hawk helicopters, drones, violated women, more casualties, teenagers sprayed with bullets. This is not Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq. I am describing America's current border region, our nation's own backyard under siege.
In a peaceful demonstration in Washington DC last month, the Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC), a group of 60 organizations in the border region, laid upon the Washington Mall a border-wall quilt, similar to the AIDS quilt, memorializing the families suffering under the current militarized state of the border region in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
When the panels came in to Washington DC, they were more disturbing and horrific then I could have imagined. They spoke of people's shattered lives and broken dreams, they spoke of hopelessness and desperation, mourning, fear, death, and pain. The panels were begging for change in the region in sometimes an empty and pathetic way. For some who sent panels to Washington, it was clear that they had nothing left. There were panels quilted out of migrants' clothes found in the desert, tributes to mothers and fathers separated from United States citizen children and spouses after a decade or more in the US, memorials to the uninvestigated deaths of 20 unarmed people known to be gunned down by border patrol agents in the past three years, poems and letters by children, a memorial to a teenage "dreamer" Joaquin Luna Jr of Texas, who committed suicide because he could not go to college and become an engineer. One section consisted of 136 square feet, or 17 panels, filled with fine print of the names of men, women, and children and the unknown who have been found in the Tucson, Arizona sector of the border, the only region where they have a body count process through an organization called Humane Borders.
The reality of the severe consequences of militarization in the border region that affects communities totaling approximately 15 million people is a little known fact in America. Maybe this can be attributed to the mainstream media's tendency to ignore stories about brown America and the poor. The border wall quilt, in fact, was not featured by a major English-language media outlet. It did get press some coverage and the Hispanic caucus and other members of congress did visit the quilt. It also inspired 20 members of Congress to send a letter to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to "discuss in greater detail CBP's plan for improving its use of force policies and practices including oversight and accountability mechanisms", and to request a "detailed discussion of [the agency's] plan to improve [its] complaint, investigation, and disciplinary process", as well as a published use of force policy handbook, and a timeline for implementation of CBP's September changes in its use of force policy. But what the quilt did not achieve was to change the national narrative or congressional focus on the border region. Nor did the quilt bring immigration reform to the US Senate floor. It got a brief mention in President Obama's year-end press conference, but only as "unfinished business".
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/21/obama-immigration-reform-unfinished-business